"Weaponization of the Federal Government." I just....I just can't.

BUT HIS [SON’S] [IRRELEVANT AND PROBABLY FAKE] EMAILS!

In a world where people were trying to do their jobs, this story would not make sense to anyone, now or ever. But because we live in the dumbest fucking timeline, you need to know the shape of the Trump cartel’s latest disinformation campaign against the American democratic process.

Former Vice President Biden is being attacked through his family, which means that his family’s story is the vital context here. Back in the ‘70s, when he was Senator-Elect Biden, his family was in a terrible car crash. His first wife and their young daughter were killed. His sons Beau and Hunter survived, though Hunter suffered a traumatic head injury. The boys went about 80% Parent Trap to convince their dad to marry his current wife Jill, and both grew up and went to law school. Beau became the attorney general of Delaware before dying of cancer in 2015. Hunter went on to a lucrative career in the private sector despite an intermittent struggle with substance abuse, which is a common aftereffect of psychological trauma and brain injuries.

Republicans generally believe that being a Yale Law grad with a wealthy father and a history of substance abuse qualifies someone for the Supreme Court, but for some deeply principled and intellectually honest reason, they have decided that Hunter Biden’s employment in the field of transportation and energy can only be a sign of spectacular corruption. So nefarious and sinister was the Biden family’s treachery that they managed to destroy every iota of evidence before multiple investigations by Senate Republicans could find any of it!

Obviously this little tabloid narrative was derailed when Trump went and got his dumb ass impeached over it. But it’s the middle of October, Trump’s down ten points in the polls, and he made the mistake of replacing the wildly unethical FBI director who threw the last election for him with a guy who at least knows to act professional, so he’s looking for a Hail Mary pass. In the wackiest of coincidences, some random Trumper had what he says might be Hunter Biden’s various hard drives, one of which apparently contained a backup of his most sensitive videos and text messages, in his computer repair shop. Of course this man did the only sensible thing and, uh, copied every file in the drives one at a time before bringing it to Trump’s TV lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and then the FBI. Giuliani, who was a former federal prosecutor before becoming the former mayor of New York City and current new bestie of Random Tech Store Guy, handled this situation with the assistance of someone who has a mere “50/50 chance” of being a Russian agent. (Poor old Rudy does appear to have limited communication skills beyond his personal safe space of a noun, a verb, and 9/11.) It’s unclear to me whether Giuliani or Tech Store Guy was the one who shared the hard drives with Steve Bannon, the white supremacist propagandist and former Trump campaign manager who is currently under indictment for fraud.

As with a lot of Trump trash, it’s impossible to describe without sounding like you’re exaggerating for comedic effect, but the stakes are too high for any of it to be funny. 

Over the weekend, a right wing tabloid published what it said were emails from one of Hunter’s laptops. (Reporters at that particular tabloid do not believe the story.) The emails don’t show any wrongdoing by the vice president and seem fake for a lot of reasons – but never mind, the bullshit laundering worked well enough to get some supposed actual reporter to harass Vice President Biden about it, and then a bunch of other supposed actual reporters to collapse into their fainting couches when Biden responded with appropriate impatience.

That apparently didn’t have the hoped-for effect. The next day, what appeared to be a series of highly emotional text exchanges between the vice president and his son appeared. There was nothing even vaguely scandalous in these, to a point where it’s not immediately obvious why anyone would bother publishing them. My best guess is that it’s meant to throw Biden off his stride by trying to hurt and humiliate his son, though it may also be an attempt to soften the ground for an even more theatrical reveal.

A lot of Very Serious Politics-Knowers have deluded themselves that the But Her Emails debacle of 2016 was the legitimate kernel of a story that was “blown out of proportion.” But Her Emails was about people a) having some degree of misogyny, conscious or unconscious, which led to a bias against Clinton and b) wanting to tell other people and/or themselves that it wasn’t because she was a woman. They understand that the But Her Emails-ing was a) enormously consequential and b) incredibly dumb. They don’t want to think too hard about that tension, because if they did, they’d have to take responsibility for how the dumb thing became so consequential.

Meanwhile, Trump campaign insiders know better than the rest of us how much they cheated in 2016, but they’re still people and therefore susceptible to the cognitive bias that they got what they wanted because they earned it somehow. The closest thing they had to an above-board strategy was yelling “emails!!” a lot, so they expect yelling “emails!!” to be successful again. They’re just desperately throwing pasta to see what sticks – but Joe Biden is a man, so they’re throwing it at the theory of relativity instead of the refrigerator door.

There are differences between 2020 and 2016 which are significantly less depressing. Trump’s co-conspirators are resorting to ridiculous methods because so many of the key players who made the 2016 operation work are actually facing punishment for some of their crimes. Paul Manafort is under house arrest. Wikileaks guy Julian Assange is in jail.  Social media companies, especially Twitter, were prepared to slam the brakes. Some mainstream reporters have refused to learn their lesson from 2016, but others were prepared to be critical. And, I cannot emphasize this last one enough, voters are more prepared for it. So Team Trump isn’t as good at doing the crimes as they were four years ago, even if they were as good at it they wouldn’t be able to use traditional and social media as effectively as they did last time, and even if they could adjust to that they’d have a harder time manipulating us. Maybe it got frustrating and boring for you to hear and talk about the 2016 attack for years on end, but the whole point of that was that we needed to be ready for exactly this scenario. So far, it seems to be working better than I would have hoped.

Obviously, this is infuriating. All else aside, putting this enormous, invasive pressure on a private citizen’s mental health and substance abuse problems is abusive and gross and genuinely dangerous. I don’t give a shit who his dad is, it’s fucking evil. We need to be ready to remember everybody involved in pushing this story – not just the con artists behind it, but the “mainstream” reporters who validated it in their behavior toward the Biden campaign or who spread what were (allegedly) entirely personal text messages of no news value.

But first, we need to win next month. On that front, I want to reiterate what I said when they first started cooking up this story late last year: it’s actually encouraging that they’re resorting to something like this, because it means they’re flailing. They haven’t been able to make FBI Director Wray abuse his power in the way former Director Comey did, despite the fact that the only real tool they had to manipulate Comey four years ago was taunting and pressure from conservative media. They don’t have a cutout like Wikileaks to launder the documents for them. Most importantly, they’re trying to influence voters’ opinions of Biden because they think voters’ behavior still matters. The only thing Trump knows in life is how to get away with a scam. If they thought they had it “rigged” they would be trying to act normal, because spending the three weeks before a heist reminding your marks of what fucking criminals you are doesn’t help you get away with it.

One last thing: this is a less obvious reason why it’s important to vote as early as you can. All these other increasingly desperate stunts depend on the ability to overwhelm everyone all at once, without enough time for them to be debunked or brought back into proportion. The more early votes are in the bank, the less effective their next stink bomb can be, and if it can’t be effective, there are a lot of people around Trump who would rather save their own asses from prison than help him throw it.

“Warrior” Steve Bannon Arrested as Trump’s America is Crumbling It often happens this way: extreme right-wingers, or call them ‘ultra-conservatives,’ either in the United States or Europe, suddenly fall from grace, after committing the most heinous crimes. Sometimes it is child abuse or sexual harassment, but most of the time, it is a corruption of tremendous proportions. In theory, in their own theory, it is not supposed to be this way. Listen to the conservatives, and they will tell you that they are there in order to uphold law and order, as well as the traditional culture of their countries. But the reality is often very far from the theory. Steve Bannon has fallen. He has fallen hard, flat on his face. But definitely not as hard, as others would fall, would they commit crimes of similar magnitude. Steve Bannon was actually not caught and charged with trying to ignite the WWIII or conspiring to overthrow the left-wing governments all over the world. He was not charged with an attempt to destroy China. He was arrested ‘only’ on charges of ‘defrauding investors,’ together with his cohort Brian Kolfage. On 28 August, CNN reported: “Kolfage was arrested last week, along with Bannon and two others, and charged by the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York with defrauding investors out of hundreds of thousands of dollars a project pledging to construct a wall along the southern US border. He is due to be arraigned on the charges on Monday in a video court appearance.” In February 2020, I wrote for NEO: “Steve Bannon, a former White House strategist and Breitbart editor, was finally kicked out of an Italian monastery, which even Newsweek wittily described as a “far-right boot camp.” Or, as even some of the Western mainstream media outlets defined it – a modern ‘gladiator’s school.’ The monastery was supposed to offer “classes,” which Bannon described as “the kind of underpinnings of the Judeo-Christian West.” That, for already quite some time, means ‘insulting and antagonizing China,’ as well as several other nations which the Western extremist and often openly racist ideologues have been depicting as hostile to the US and European hegemonic interests. Some of those who oppose Bannon’s radical political stands are now bringing vast charges against him, but legal and moral, and such charges are ranging from pushing the United States towards the war with the People’s Republic of China to interfering with internal affairs of other countries, including those in Europe. There are other, unsavory accusations against the former White House strategist and a close ally of President Donald Trump: child abuse and enormous corruption. The question is: how could the individual against whom so many accusative fingers are pointed at, survive at the top of the establishment for so many years, in so many different roles and positions? Yes, he gets kicked out from places: first from the White House, then from the “gladiator booth camp,” and finally from the luxury yacht belonging to an anti-Beijing apostate. But somehow, he always manages to bounce back. Until now. Hopefully, for not much longer. *** Alarms should have been ringing for so many years. But were they? If yes, no one has been paying much attention. As early as in 2016, even an extreme right-wing FOX News picked up Associated Press report which was accusing Bannon of anti-Semitism: “In a sworn court declaration following their divorce, Piccard said her ex-husband had objected to sending their twin daughters to an elite Los Angeles academy because he “didn’t want the girls going to school with Jews.” “He said he doesn’t like Jews…” In August 2019, Mail Online raised an alarming issue, connecting Mr. Bannon with an accused child sex trafficker George Nader: “A convicted pedophile visited Donald Trump’s White House on at least 13 different occasions in 2017 to meet with then-chief strategist Steve Bannon, according to leaked visitor logs. George Nader, who has been convicted of sexually abusing young boys and is now in federal prison awaiting trial on child sex trafficking charges, first visited Bannon in the White House in February 2017, the month after Trump’s inauguration, the Washington Examiner reported. After that, he kept visiting Bannon, who had a West Wing office yards from the Oval Office, the leaked visitor logs revealed, but it isn’t clear if he entertained Nader in his office or somewhere else in the White House. The revelation raises serious questions about how a convicted pedophile could be allowed entry repeatedly to the White House. The Secret Service is responsible for carrying out background checks of all visitors.”   The “revelation” also raises questions about whether there have been two tiers of justice: one for the common US citizens, and another one for those who are levitating in the highest spheres of, mainly right-wing, power. Steve Bannon was also apparently giving false testimonies under oath, related to the Wikileaks and Julian Assange. And if one would think that Steve Bannon is ‘only’ anti-Semitic, then what about his deep allergy towards the Muslims; and the support for the Trump’s so-called “Muslim ban” and keeping out from the United States all those “bad people” (meaning non-whites and non-Christians)? His obsession with the wall between the US and Mexico is, of course, related to the “topic.” *** But who would be Steve Bannon without China? He is hatred impersonated against China. As for his fellow right-wing crusaders, like Peter Navarro, Marco Rubio, and Mike Pompeo, China is always ‘there,’ in the middle of vile speeches, dragged through the dirt, belittled. Steeper and faster is a decline of the American Eagle, more confident is an ascend of the Chinese Dragon, louder, more desperate, and bizarre is the anti-Chinese rhetoric of the pro-Western warriors, led by Steve Bannon and his mates. On 08 June 2020, AntiWar.com described something that would be unimaginable just several years ago, but what is turning into a norm, under the present White House administration: “New Yorkers looked to the sky in puzzlement the night of 03 June as a fleet of airplanes circled New York Harbor with banners that read “Congratulations New Federal State of China.” Behind the bizarre stunt was exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui and former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon. The duo deemed the Chinese Communist Party illegitimate and declared a new state of China from a boat floating in front of the Statue of Liberty. In a live stream, Guo and Bannon read the Chinese and English versions of “A Declaration of the New Federal State of China,” a document that lays out their fantastical plan to take out the CCP and form a Western-style democracy in China. The live stream aired in China on 04 June, which marked the 31st anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests and crackdown in Beijing. “The Chinese Communist Party is a terrorist organization funded by the Communist International which has subverted the legitimate Chinese government in the past,” the document declares.” Would this be done the other way around, like if the People’s Republic of China declared the United States of America a terrorist genocidal and illegitimate state, because it exterminated most of its native population, forced slaves from Africa onto its territory, and then massacred tens of millions of people on all continents of the world, that would be surely considered a declaration of war. But obviously, the US and its leadership are truly ‘spoiled’; they are used to getting away, literally, with a murder. Or with a war. Steve Bannon has been twisting the narrative on basically everything that is related to China, from Xinjiang to the South China Sea, an extremist religious cult such as Falun Gong, recent historical events, Chinese Revolution, and the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). He and his cohorts are fanatically anti-Communist, as they are outrageously racist. The danger of Bannon lies in the fact that he is an integral part of the extreme right-wing network, which is now spreading from Europe to India, from North and South America to Asia. He is its product, as well as its maker. Whoever is confronting China is his ally: from India’s Modi to Donald Trump. Or all those West-backed rioters and the anti-Beijing individuals like Elmer Yuen Gong Yi. In fact, the Hong Kong riots are direct results of the activities of Steve Bannon and his mates. If they are not stopped, there really may be a war. But that does not frighten Steve Bannon. He has nothing against a war. He desired a war. He is igniting it. Like the crusaders of the middle ages, he thrives on expansions and the conflicts. Forbes reported, somehow sarcastically, on 20 August 2020: “The yacht former white house senior advisor Steve Bannon was arrested on recently is the 152-foot-long Feadship Lady May that’s reportedly owned by Guo Wengui, an exiled Chinese billionaire who has business ties with Bannon. And it’s for sale.” It is all very symbolic. It is shocking. But at least the man who did so much harm to the world, and who has been pushing his country towards direct confrontation with the most populous nation on earth, is under arrest, although presently released on $5 million bail. Associated Press reported on 24 August 2020: “US District Judge Analisa Torres said President Donald Trump’s former chief strategist can appear in her court along with three co-defendants on a video screen because of the health threat posed by the coronavirus.” A lenient treatment. But logical; shockingly, Mr. Bannon is not seen as a delinquent by the US establishment. To many, he is just a pro-Western, pro-Christian, pro-right-wing warrior. As he himself so proudly declares he is.

2017 Holiday Newsletter

Welcome to the 2017 Politics and Prose Holiday Newsletter. As always, we’re proud to present a selection of some of the year’s most impressive books. Happy holidays to all!

The Obama Years

There is no shortage of Obama Administration alums writing books. The question is: Which are actually worth reading? One is Thanks, Obama (Ecco) by David Litt, who became a presidential speechwriter at the ripe old age of twenty-four and now is somehow old enough to pen a memoir. He details his White House experience with humor, self-deprecation, and a healthy reverence for his boss and the causes the Obama Administration championed. Readers will especially enjoy his tales of being the go-to-guy for Obama’s funniest lines and most memorable comedic performances. The book offers a nice peek at life inside the White House and the ups and downs of crafting a message for a president – even one who reads, thinks, reflects, and tells the truth. - Lissa M.

As the official White House photographer, Pete Souza spent countless hours during eight years with President Barack Obama. He captured the famous Situation Room meeting in which Obama, surrounded by senior national security aides, monitored the raid that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden. And he caught the president in many lighter times as well, whether with children, friends, or family members. In all, Souza took nearly two million photos. Obama: An Intimate Portrait (Little, Brown,) reproduces 300 of the most representative ones, documenting consequential moments of decision and official action alongside numerous less scripted occasions. The result is an historic photographic record of a landmark presidency and an intimate portrait of a man who occupied America’s most powerful office. - Brad G.

...And After

In this detailed history of the libertarian movement, Nancy MacLean fully justifies the lurid image of her title. Democracy in Chains (Viking) chronicles a century or more of efforts by the radical right not simply to influence “who rules” but to overturn “the rules” of American government and save the wealthy minority from the “exploitative majority.” MacLean, a Duke professor of history and public policy, starts this “utterly chilling story of the intellectual origins of the single most powerful and least understood threat to democracy today” in 1956 in Charlottesville, Virginia. At that point James McGill Buchanan, the Nobel economist at the center of her account, was establishing the Thomas Jefferson Center for Studies in Political Economy at the University of Virginia. One of a number of ostensibly academic institutes and think-tanks, most funded by libertarian billionaires, the Center discouraged any open discussion of ideas and concentrated exclusively on turning “libertarian creed into a national counterrevolution.” MacLean tracks several campaigns that, while falling short of the ultimate goal, have nonetheless eroded trust in government institutions and have changed the way politics is done. Resisting the Brown decision, for instance, the state of Virginia pressed hard for the privatization of schools; one county closed its public schools for several years rather than comply with the order to integrate. But by reframing an issue of race as an issue of freedom of choice, the right opened a wider discussion of the government’s role in schools, and MacLean shows how libertarians have employed this “stealth” strategy with increasing success through the later twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Her closely-argued and passionate study loops back to John C. Calhoun and the Gilded Age for the seeds of Buchanan’s public choice theory, then shows, with the Flint water crisis, climate change denial, Scott Walker’s anti-union measures, increasing privatization of prisons, the anti-Obamacare movement, and much more, how effectively they’ve been sown. - Laurie G.

As Hillary Clinton’s longtime former speechwriter, I was worried about whether she could write a book with authenticity and self-reflection less than a year after her shocking defeat in the presidential election. But writing What Happened (@simonbooks), she explains, became her therapy. The book forced her to reckon with her own mistakes as well as the external forces that contributed to one of the most bizarre and disastrous presidential campaigns in American history. It is her sixth book and in it she speaks with candor and a wry humor that the public rarely sees. Especially poignant is her masterful connecting of dots on the allegations of Russian intrusion into our electoral process. This is not self-serving; she clearly and persuasively alerts Americans to the very real dangers presented when hostile countries and political foes weaponize social media and technology to manipulate opinions and attitudes, and attempt to erode our democracy. The book is interesting, very funny, and covers really important stuff. Read it. - Lissa M.

Susan Bordo makes no pretense of journalistic objectivity in this excellent political book. Instead, The Destruction of Hillary Clinton (@melvillehouse) makes the case that external forces were part of what undid Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Bordo, a respected feminist academic and author of a previous biography of Anne Boleyn, blogged almost daily during the presidential race and turned her real time observations into this book. Most in her crosshairs are Bernie Sanders, James Comey, and the press. For those looking for a smart defense of Hillary in 2016, this is it. - Lissa M.

Just about anyone would find Shattered (@crownpublishing)—Washington Post reporters Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’s fast-moving and detailed account of the trials and travails that beset the 2016 Clinton campaign—an interesting and compelling read. I’d be remiss if I didn’t single out two particular groups of people who would be especially intrigued: campaign wonks on either side of the political aisle, and fans of Greek and Shakespearean tragedies. For liberals weary of re-experiencing any election-related trauma, have faith: Allen and Parnes, who previously authored the positive portrayal of Hillary Clinton in the biography HRC, depict both Clinton and her campaign staff sympathetically, trying as best they can to navigate the minefield that was the 2016 election. Even if you experienced last year as an avid news consumer and continue to be flabbergasted (and/or horrified) by the outcome, Shattered will help shed some light on what may have seemed unexplainable. A must-read read for news junkies everywhere. - Isaac S.

Before writing Devil’s Bargain ( @thepenguinpress) author Joshua Green labeled Steve Bannon “the most dangerous political operative in America.” Now, in his authoritative, readable new book, Green explains just how a bombastic right-wing political extremist bent on “disrupting” the status quo became the most influential strategist behind the campaign and presidency of Donald Trump. Green looks at Bannon’s roots, political and cultural sensibilities, previous ventures (successful and not), and of course… follows the money. Bannon’s rise and his access to financiers who share his extreme views is a cautionary tale, and essential reading one year into the Trump presidency. - Lissa M.

Here’s your dose of “What the Fuck Is Going On” News (2/23/2017 edition)

The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) kicked off and many in attendance refused to believe or see fault with Trump's travel spending. It's estimated that Trump has already cost taxpayers nearly as much as Obama spent traveling annually, and this outrage was a common theme over the last years at CPAC. The overwhelming responses towards Trump's expenses were that the media is lying and the numbers presented are by people who are against Trump. (source)

Kellyanne Conway spoke at CPAC and talked about feminism. Conway said that she doesn't consider herself a feminist in the "classic sense" because she doesn't hate men and she isn't "pro-abortion," but she would consider herself a conservative feminist. She then went on to use her mother as an example of "what feminism is all about," by citing her not getting child support, alimony, using government assistance, and not being "a victim of circumstances." She then somehow made the connection that those who oppose Trump just have “a problem with women in power.” (source)

Betsy DeVos talked at CPAC about the recent decision to roll back on protections for transgender students. There were reports that DeVos was more reluctant to sign off on the federal guidance but she assured everyone that she's supports the action taken. DeVos said that the protections were government overreach and should be dealt with at a local level because it's not "one size fits all." (source)

White House chief of staff Reince Priebus and chief strategist Steve Bannon took the stage together at CPAC where they spent most of their time attacking journalists. Bannon continually called the media the "opposition party" and said that journalists relationship with Trump will never improve because "everyday will be a fight," and "it's going to get worse everyday," because they're "adamantly opposed to an economic nationalist agenda like Donald Trump has." Priebus said that the biggest misconception people have about Trump and the White House is “everything that youre reading.” (source) (source)

Richard Spencer was in attendance at CPAC where he was eventually asked to leave. Dan Schneider of the American Conservative Union gave a speech at the event where he denounced the "alt-right movement," and he went on to claim that the alt-righters are secretly "left wing fascists," attempting to hijack the right. CPAC told reporters that they removed Spencer because he and the alt-right don't represent their views. Interestly enough they have no problem with those in Trump's administration who align themselves with the "alr-right" and even made Steve Bannon one of their key speakers for the day. (source)

Next week the House republicans are planning on derailing a resolution that will force Trump to disclose his potential ties with Russia and business-related conflicts of interest. Republicans will send proposal to the House Judiciary Committee for a panel vote on Tuesday to make sure the vote gets lost in the chaos. They are intentionally scheduling it right before Trump gives his first address to Congress - which will take up the bulk of the media coverage and attention. (source)

It’s being reported that the FBI and other federal agencies rejected the White House’s request to refute stories about contact between members of the Trump campaign and members of the Russian intelligence community. The White House wanted these agencies to publicly say that the reports by the media were wrong. This direct communication between the White House and the FBI is restricted and the request from the White House is a violation of procedures that limit communications with the FBI on pending investigations. (source)

A White House official said that they are pushing back the release of the revised executive order on travel and refugees until next week. No explanation was given for the delay. (source)

Trump said that the administration's efforts to remove undocumented immigrants is "a military operation." His comment led to some confusion and concern but according to Sean Spicer he did not misspeak, he was not being literal, and was using the phrase as an "adjective." Trump also commented that these deportations are "the first time" we're removing gang members and drug dealers - obviously completely untrue. (source) (source)

The Department of Homeland Security confirmed that they are working on a plan to send migrants who had entered the United States from Mexico back to Mexico, even if they were not citizens of that country. Currently these people are allowed to request asylum but the Trump administration wants them to do so from Mexico. A DHS official explained that they can make a claim for asylum and have their cases heard but it has to be done from Mexico and they have to wait there. (source)

In an interview with Reuters today, Trump said that he wants to build up the U.S. nuclear arsenal to ensure it's at "the top of the pack." He went on to say that the strategic arms limitation treaty, known as New START, between the U.S. and Russia is a "bad deal," and a "one-sided deal." Trump also spoke out against Russia's deployment of a ground-based cruise missile and said "to me it's a big deal." However when asked if he would raise the issue with Putin he answered "if and when we meet." Trump has no scheduled meeting with Putin. (source)

Attorney General Jeff Sessions made it public that he has rescinded a guidance that tasked the Justice Department with ending its use of privately operated prisons. After Sessions memo was released, there were quickly sharp spikes in the stock prices of Core Civic and GEO Group, which are the biggest American prison corporations. (source)

U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski is sponsoring legislation that will open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge that takes up Alaska's northeast corner in order to drill for oil. The refuge is larger than the size of West Virginia and Connecticut combined and serves as a nursery for polar bears, muskoxen, porcupine caribou and birds from all 50 states migrate there. (source) 

Former Republican House Speaker John Boehner spoke out about the Republican's plans to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act. He believes that the hopes to “repeal and replace” are too optimistic because "republicans never ever agree on health care," and "I shouldn’t call it repeal-and-replace, because it’s not going to happen." (source)

Press secretary Sean Spicer told the press today that we will likely see a greater marijuana enforcement under Trump. The issue seems to be with state's recreational legalization, Spicer pointed out that there's still federal law and that we will see "greater enforcement of it." Spicer also blamed recreational marijuana laws on the opioid addiction spikes in some states, despite studies showing it actually does the exact opposite. (source)

And now your daily reminder that: Flint, Michigan still doesn’t have clean water. Standing Rock still needs your support. The American infrastructure report card still averages poorly with the rating of a “D+” And I would also suggest looking into donating to help the Chesed Shel Emeth Society repair and replace the broken monuments that were recently desecrated in an act of anti-Semitic vandalism. 

Hasan Minhaj's one-liners from last night's White House correspondents’ dinner:

— “I would say it is an honor to be here, but that would be an alternative fact. It is not. No one wanted to do this. So of course it lands in the hands of an immigrant.”

— “Don Rickles died just so you wouldn’t ask him to do this gig, all right? RIP to Don Rickles, the only Donald with skin thick enough to take a joke like that.”

— “A lot of people in the media say that Donald Trump goes golfing too much. . . which raises a very important question: Why do you care? Do you want to know what he’s not doing when he’s golfing? Being president. Let the man putt-putt! . . . The longer you keep him distracted, the longer we’re not at war with North Korea.”

— “We gotta address the elephant that’s not in the room. The leader of our country is not here. And that’s because he lives in Moscow; it is a very long flight. It’d be hard for Vlad to make it. Vlad can’t just make it on a Saturday! As for the other guy, I think he’s in Pennsylvania because he can’t take a joke.”

— “There was also another elephant in the room, but Donald Trump Jr. shot it and cut off its tail.”

— “Jeff Sessions couldn’t be here tonight, he was busy doing a pre-Civil War reenactment. On his RSVP, he just wrote ‘NO.’ Just ‘no,’ which happens to be his second favorite n-word.”

— “Is Steve Bannon here? I do not see Steve Bannon. I do NOT see Steve Bannon. Not see Steve Bannon. Nazi Steve Bannon.”

— “Betsy DeVos couldn’t be here; she’s busy curating her collection of children’s tears.”

— “Frederick Douglass isn’t here, and that’s because he’s dead. Someone please tell the president.”

— “Mike Pence wanted to be here tonight, but his wife would not let him because apparently one of you ladies is ovulating. So good job, ladies. Because of you we couldn’t hang out with Mike Pence.”

— “Even Hillary Clinton couldn’t be here tonight. I mean, she could have been here, but I think someone told her the event was in Wisconsin and Michigan.”

— “[Sean Spicer] has been doing PR since 1999. He has been doing this job for 18 years. And somehow, after 18 years, his go-to move when you ask him a tough question is denying the Holocaust. That is insane! How many people do you know that can turn a press briefing into a full-on Mel Gibson traffic stop?”

— “Donald Trump is liar-in-chief. Remember, you guys are public enemy number one. You are his biggest enemy. Journalists, ISIS, normal-length ties.”

— “It is amazing to be among the greatest journalists in the world, and yet, when we all checked into the Hilton on Friday, we all got a USA Today. Every time a USA Today slides underneath my door, it’s like they’re saying, ‘Hey, you’re not that smart, right?’ USA Today is what happens when the coupon section takes over the newspaper. Is this an article about global warming or 50 cents off Tide? Either way, the pictures are so pretty!”

— “The news coming out of the White House is so stressful, I’ve been watching ‘House of Cards’ just to relax. Oh man, a congressman pushed a journalist in front of a moving train? That’s quaint!”

— “Even if you guys groan, I’ve already hired Kellyanne Conway; she’s gonna go on TV on Monday and tell everybody I killed, so it really doesn’t matter.”

— (To the press) “Remember election night? That was your Steve Harvey/Miss Universe moment.”

— “It was all fun and games with Obama, right? You were covering an adult who could speak English. And now you’re covering President Trump, so you gotta take your game to a whole new level. It’s like if a bunch of stripper cops had to solve a real-life murder.”

— “Tonight is about defending the First Amendment and the free press, and I am truly honored to be here, even though all of Hollywood pulled out now that King Joffrey is president and it feels like the Red Wedding in here.”

— “We all know this administration likes deleting history faster than Anthony Weiner when he hears footsteps.”

— “[Donald Trump] tweets at 3 a.m. sober. Who is tweeting at 3 a.m. sober? Donald Trump, because it’s 10 a.m. in Russia. Those are business hours.”

— “This has been one of the strangest events I’ve ever done in my life. I’m being honest with you. I feel like I’m a tribute in ‘The Hunger Games.’ If this goes poorly, Steve Bannon gets to eat me.”

— “Fox News is here. I’m amazed you guys even showed up. How are you here in public? It’s hard to trust you guys when you backed a man like Bill O’Reilly for years. But it finally happened. Bill O’Reilly has been fired. But then, you gave him a $25 million severance package. Making it the only package he won’t force a woman to touch.”

— “I know some of you are wondering, Hasan, how do you know so much about Fox News? Well as a Muslim, I like to watch Fox News for the same reason I like to play ‘Call of Duty.’ Sometimes, I like to turn my brain off and watch strangers insult my family and heritage.”

— “MSNBC is here tonight. And I’m glad you guys are here. That way if I’m bombing, Brian Williams will describe it as stunning.”

— “MSNBC. It’s hard to trust you guys when you send so many mixed messages. On the one hand you tell us the prison industrial complex is the problem, and then you air five straight hours of ‘Lockup.’ You can’t be mad at corporations profiting off of minorities in prison when you’re a corporation profiting off of minorities in prison.”

— “I had a lot more MSNBC jokes, but I don’t want to just ramble on, otherwise I might get a show on MSNBC.”

— “CNN is here, baby. You guys got some really weird trust issues with the public. I’m not going to call you fake news, but everything isn’t breaking news. You can’t go to DEFCON-1 just because Sanjay Gupta found a new moisturizer.”

— “All you guys do is stoke up conflict. Don, every time I watch your show, it feels like I’m watching a reality TV show. ‘CNN Tonight’ should just be called ‘Wait a Second Now Hold On Stop Yelling At Each Other With Don Lemon.’”

— “You guys have to be more perfect now more than ever. Because you are how the president gets his news. Not from advisers, not from experts, not from intelligence agencies. You guys. So that’s why you gotta be on your A game. You gotta be twice as good. You can’t make any mistakes. Because when one of you messes up, he blames your entire group. And now you know what it feels like to be a minority.”

— (Later, addressed again to the media.) “By the way, you guys aren’t really minorities, you’re super white.”

— “It’s 11 p.m. In four hours, Donald Trump will be tweeting about how badly Nicki Minaj did at this dinner. And he’ll be doing it completely sober. And that’s his right. And I’m proud that all of us are here to defend that right, even if the man in the White House never would.”

Just another ISO presentation

This is in the context of a multi-org anti-semitism/islamophobia solidarity event.

Hello,

I am here on behalf of the ISO. We decided to put this event together in response to the skyrocketing number of cases of both anti-Semitic and islamophobic violence that are sweeping the country. This has included A Sikh man shot in Kent Washington, a Muslim boy hung outside Seattle, four mosques burned and more than 140 bomb threats against Jewish Community Centers… 

With all of that horrific shit going on it seems reasonable to ask: where is this coming from?

An easy answer seems to be the Trump Administration. Among them are those known for their islamophobic and anti-Semitic and even fascistic beliefs. Advisor to the President, Steve Bannon for example is alleged to have said that he “doesn’t like Jews and that he doesn’t like the way they raise their kids to be ‘whiney brats’ and that he didn’t want [his] girls going to school with Jews” and then there is Senior Advisor Steven Miller who in university was not only personal friends with Richard Spencer but worked with notorious islamophobe David Horowitz’s Organization to design a so-called “Islamofascism Awareness Week” to be used at campuses nationwide.

With these openly racist faces in the White House the white-nationalist and neo-Nazi scum that inhabits American far right has taken note of this change in tone by prominent members of the US government and they have been crawling out of the gutters, emboldened to commit a new wave of violence.

As a recent article in Jacobin Magazine put it:

“Although the alt-right remains on the fringes in the United States, it has come within proximity to real power and is trying to position itself as court philosopher. Figures like [the neo-Nazi] Richard Spencer see themselves as the Trump movement’s organic intellectuals, guiding the president’s followers, whom they characterize as a directionless ‘body without a head’”.

It would be easy to say that these are simply new and bad actors in American politics but the roots of these problems go back a long way and are deeply embedded in the US political system.

Islamophobia has long played a dual role in the US political machine, especially since 9/11, on the one hand it functions as a tool to dehumanize Muslims abroad and justify their slaughter by US troops in Iraq, Libya , Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan and further abroad while on the other hand it divides working class Americans against each other here at home allowing for a particularly perverse kind of nationalism to take root.  Take for example George Bush’s comments from 2006 when he remarked:

“Since the horror of 9/11, we’ve learned a great deal about the enemy. And we have learned that their goal is to build a radical Islamic empire where women are prisoners in their homes, men are beaten for missing prayer meetings, and terrorists have a safe haven to plan and launch attacks on America and other civilized nations…. This struggle has been called a clash of civilizations. In truth, it is a struggle for civilization.”

This kind of rhetoric calls to memory the words of Marxist writer and psychologist Frantz Fanon who described how in order to justify their oppression colonial overlords depict their subjects as “impervious to ethics, representing not only the absence of values but also the negation of values”

This dual form of racism is no stranger to American Jews either. In the 20s and 30s according to the Congress of Secular Jewish Organizations: “A typical Jewish worker… could easily belong to a Jewish labor union and/or a mutual aid organization… send their child to a socialist… after-school program and summer camp, live in cooperative housing, attend lectures by Yiddish and socialist speakers and vote for the Socialist Party.” However, decades of anti-Semitism and McCarthyism teamed up to paint these liberatory ideas, so popular among the Jewish community, as somehow “foreign” and “un-american” and those spreading them as merely “agents of a global judeo-bolshevik conspiracy”

On top of that this idea of conspiracy doubles as a foil against critques of the capitalist system as a whole. Any systemic problems with capitalism can be easily scapegoated against Jews leaving the American ruling class off the hook for their crimes while Jews get shafted and attacked by fellow members of the working class.

While the Jewish Labor movement might no longer be a target of the mainstream political establishment, racist islamophobic ideas have since 9/11 enjoyed broad cross-the-aisle political consensus in our government. Democratic Party nominee Hillary Clinton for example, when asked in a presidential debate about national security went on a long rant about how American Muslims need to be on the “front lines” of the fight against “terror” and after the Pulse nightclub shooting she called for a return to the spirit of 9/12. Ironically, we might have achieved just the tenor of racist paranoia that reigned supreme after 9/11 under the Trump government.

        On the policy substance while republicans might have been behind the more heinous acts of islamophobic legislation it was the democrats who organized a congressional sit-in with the goal of forcing Republicans into voting on a so called “no-fly, no-buy” gun control measure. A ban that just like Trump’s immigration order would have overwhelmingly been targeted at Muslims, many of them innocent and unrelated to terrorist groups. On top of this, while he was president Obama continued to attack and imprison innocent Muslim civilians.

Along with this consensus against so called “Political Islam” has been a consensus on neo-liberal policies that have overwhelmingly enriched the 1% at the expense of ordinary working class people. These economic policies and the fallout of the global economic recession from 2008 have caused a sustained downturn in standards of living which has led to the very political polarization that has contributed to the rise of Trump and his brand of racist populism. The thing we of course realize as Socialists, is that the problem isn’t caused by Jews running the Banks or by Evil ‘Jihadis’ swarming our shores in the guise of refugees to kill our children, but in the way that these concerns have very strategically been used to turn us against each other and our own self interests. Take for example the story of Peter a former member of the Southern Poverty Law center recognized hate group: the III% organization.

Peter might have continued to share the racist views of his compatriots if it wasn’t for an encounter with a Muslim neighbor of his, through which they became close friends. This rocked Peter’s world and he shortly afterwards dropped out of the III% militia. In the statement, he drafted after leaving he said that:

        “I came to understand that … the III% Movement … had been subtly maneuvered into shifting our attention and efforts towards ensuring that… Muslims were kept in check, and that groups like Black Lives Matter were resisted. It didn’t make any sense anymore. Those people want the same things we do. Better quality of life. Less government intrusion. More justice and accountability. The only difference is the way we were going about getting those things. We should be uniting the working class and poor people across the country, not dividing along racial and religious lines. That is precisely what the rich want. They want more division. More strife in the working class.”

        The general sentiment of his comments ring shockingly true. Islamophobia, more than just a tool of imperialist aggression has, just like anti-Semitism been used to turn people who benefit from unity against each other. Ultimately the same people that have inflicted the economic damage that drove Peter to stand up against the US government in the first place are the ones now carrying out imperial invasions of Muslim countries and perpetuating Islamophobic stereotypes while neo-Nazis and anti-Semites blame the whole thing on a “Jewish conspiracy”. Only through unity and solidarity with each other’s struggles can we possibly hope to overcome this dark time. We must follow in the footsteps of people like Muslim activist Tarek El-Messidi who, when he saw that a local Jewish Burial ground had been attacked raised 80,000 dollars of donations from his local Muslim community to help repair the damage.  Or in the footsteps of the president of Temple Bnai Israel in Victoria Texas who gave the keys of their synagogue to the local Muslim community so that they would have a place to pray after their mosque was set on fire. Whether you are Jewish, Muslim, or none of the above, we must all hold to the truth of the classic slogan, an injury to one is an injury to all.

Take the Offensive: Moving from Protest to Resistance

It’s time to strategize. Is it more realistic to set out to overturn the Muslim ban, halt further construction of the border wall, help our friends and loved ones evade ICE roundups, stop the DAPL and Keystone XL, protect our drinking water, slow down global warming, tame the financial sector and stop the police from killing people and defend abortion access—or to take down the government itself? Should we fight a thousand defensive battles—or a single offensive one?

In less than four weeks, the Trump administration has accomplished something that American radicals haven’t been able to do for almost 250 years: it has convinced the majority of the American people that the government is a public menace. Trump and his cronies have picked fights with Black people, Latinos and Latinas, Native Americans, Muslims, immigrants, feminists, environmentalists, radicals, progressives, liberals, and a swath of federal, state, and municipal employees—in short, with the better part of the population. For good measure, they appear to be trying to provoke a major terrorist attack in the United States in hopes that it would shore up their dubious mandate. Undoubtedly, I’m forgetting something. It’s been an eventful month.

Furthermore, the administration has antagonized the CIA, the NSA, and the Mexican and Chinese governments; aligned itself with Russia to such an extent as to create national security scandals; and threatened to upset the entire post-Cold War global order. On the public relations side, it is making up fantastic stories out of thin air and has randomly gone to war with CNN.

Consequently, the American corporate, political, industrial, financial, media, military, and intelligence elites are at cross purposes, deeply divided among themselves. Some factions are betting that neo-fascism is the wave of the future and that it will be good for business. Other factions would prefer to return to business as usual. Given the events of the last twenty-five days, it seems possible that the administration will overstep its authority and bring about a constitutional crisis at some point over the next four years, if not sooner. If such a “crisis of legitimacy” does develop, it is likely that the latter factions of the ruling class would prefer regime change to dictatorship.

I hate to resort to Game of Thrones references, but Donald Trump and Steve Bannon are acting the parts of Cersei Lannister and Maester Qyburn respectively: not only are they playing with fire, oblivious to the dragons circling on the horizon, but they consider themselves to be very clever.

If this is really how the administration wants to do things, they can bring it on. White conservatives and a small number of web-based reactionary activists versus people of color, white liberals, a seasoned cadre of radicals and progressives, and the vast majority of Millennials? Let’s do this. They may have more guns, but we definitely have more numbers. Home team bats last.

Trump and Bannon have had a few weeks to push people around. In doing so, they’ve backed themselves into a corner and alienated over half of the country. Now, it’s time to do like our grandparents taught us and punch these bullies in the face. Here are a few suggestions for how to do so—and what comes next.

Protest Won’t Change Anything—Resistance Will

Protest is so 2003, people. Resistance is the new black. It is all well and good for thousands or even millions of people to assemble in the street. However, doing so accomplishes nothing in and of itself, as many of us bitterly remember from the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq fourteen years ago. On the other hand, gathering at times and places where our presence impacts the day-to-day operations of essential infrastructure can accomplish a great deal, as many of us remember fondly from the airport occupations two weeks ago. This is the difference between symbolic protest and direct action, which anarchists have been pointing out for upwards of 150 years. Less protest, more action, please.

Seriously, there is no point in pleading with this government or registering our opposition to its policies. They truly could not care less what we think. We need to make it impossible for them to govern. We can do this. For the moment, it may be enough to simply start picking targets to shut down, sending out calls over Twitter, seeing how many people show up, and taking it from there. I think that the airport actions were the right idea—we just need to apply that model to some part of the government itself.

Take the Offensive

They always say that the best defense is a good offense, and it did just work out that way for the Patriots in the Super Bowl. The Trump administration is trying to send us scrambling in a thousand different directions at once. It’s a trap. They hope to prevent us from capitalizing on the fact that their government is out of step with the values and desires of most American people and holds questionable legitimacy in the eyes of millions.

It is true that many of us have to stay focused on solidarity work, mutual aid, and self-defense. There’s no way around that. However, the time has come to ask ourselves: under an extremely hostile administration, is it more realistic to set out to overturn the Muslim ban and halt further construction of the border wall, help our friends and loved ones evade ICE roundups and stay out of prison, stop the DAPL and Keystone XL, protect our drinking water and slow down global warming, tame the financial sector and stop the police from killing people and defend abortion access all at the same time—or to take down the government itself?

We may find that the only way to prevent everything from getting drastically worse is by going all in on revolution.

Tap the Powers of Millions

Huge segments of society are angry and afraid, full of fresh ideas and energy, open to radical perspectives, paying attention, well informed, struggling to survive, and ready to fight. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.

Resistance to the Trump regime will succeed or fail depending on how effective we are at finding each other and making the most of our various strengths. We need great numbers of people to participate if we are going to prevail. No crack team of specialized activists can do this on their own. No judge or politician is going to set things right. Nobody can save us but ourselves. That should be more than enough.

Three Possible Futures

Suppose, then, that there is a crisis of legitimacy ahead for Trump. What are the likely scenarios, and how do we prepare? Let’s look ahead a little further since things have been happening so fast lately.

The most likely possibility is still that the Deep State (as represented by entrenched elements in the CIA, the neoconservatives in the Republican Party, etc.) will manage to rein Trump in somehow, permitting him to carry out the ordinary racist aspects of his program but preventing him from going overboard with economic protectionism, haphazard foreign policy, and collusion with Russia. Repression will keep pace with escalating social tensions as the law-abiding Left sells out protest movements in return for another shot at state power. In this scenario, we lose, Steve Bannon and the white nationalists lose, and the Deep State wins, stabilizing capitalism for another four years or more.

Those losses would be temporary, however—throughout such an administration, anarchists would compete with white nationalists for the allegiance of increasingly disillusioned sectors of the Left and Right. In such a scenario, it should be possible to make the case to white working people that the bankers and businessmen have bamboozled them once again by getting them to back Trump.

It is less likely—but possible—that Trump will face a real crisis of legitimacy. In this case, protest movements will rise to a boil, forcing the Deep State to choose between Trump’s presidency and the stability of the state itself. If the Deep State steps in to depose Trump, whether covertly or overtly, real social change may be on the table—but only if the momentum that drives events is coming from below, beyond the control of any party with a stake in state power. In this scenario, Steve Bannon and the white nationalists lose—at least temporarily—and we duke it out with the Deep State.

This scenario involves tremendous risks. Remember, this is basically what happened in Egypt in 2013 when the Egyptian military deposed Morsi and installed the strongman al-Sisi in his place—effectively bringing the so-called Arab Spring to a close and re-stabilizing totalitarianism in the Middle East. If we count on elements in the government to take care of the situation, they will do whatever they have to do to sideline or suppress radical activity—and people will look to the state to solve their problems for another full generation or more. On the other hand, if we proceed into open battle with the Deep State in conditions of upheaval, we had better have a great deal of the population behind us, and we had better do so in a way that doesn’t leave any space for white nationalists to regain their footing in opposition movements while we are reeling from repression.

Finally, it is possible that there will be a crisis of legitimacy but Trump will come out on top, using it to purge the opposition and wipe out protest movements. In this case, Steve Bannon and the white nationalists will win and everyone else will lose. This seems to be the least likely scenario—but most of us were surprised by Trump’s victory, too. In this case, it will be possible for Bannon and his ilk to portray anarchists as tools of the Deep State at precisely the same time as they are able to silence us with repression.

Reviewing these possibilities, a few things become clear. It is essential to organize in a way that distinguishes us from all state actors and leaves no space for the state to regain legitimacy; antifascism must mean opposition to the state itself, lest we topple Trump only to pave the way for an equally authoritarian regime. The sooner a crisis comes, the better, before Trump, the Deep State, and the Democratic opposition have the chance to get their feet under them; at the same time, we have considerable work to do making our proposals comprehensible to the general public. Last but not least, if regime change takes place, the momentum must come from the streets, not from within the halls of power. As usual, we’ll get out of revolution what we put into it, nothing more.

In any case, our work is cut out for us and the stakes are double or nothing. We’ll see you at the front.

Full Interview w/ Laurel Butler

The spark for Planner 4 the Revolution began at a community organizing event entitled, “Calling It In: An Organizing Meeting + Workshop Space to Figure Out How to Talk About White Supremacy in the Context of the Election.” This event was an inspiring day full of hard truths, good tips and heavy listening. The impetus for “Calling It In” started with a text the organizer received while she was getting her hair touched up with our very own Lauren VonLipstick. So, in full circle style we offer an interview with the woman who put us in motion… community organizer, LA feminist rock staple, professor at UCLA, and general badass, Laurel Butler. Interviewed right in the chair where it happened.

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“Call in the vibes, try to influence the outcome with magic. And then it turned out Satan did make something happen.” - LB

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P4R: How did the idea for “Calling It In” come about?

LB:  “So, at like 1 in the morning, my husband and I were like in a trance, and I was like we have to go to CVS, so we got in the car and I bought a packet of bad Clairol discount black hair dye, this is literally the only thing that makes sense to me right now. Is like this act. I think it was part teenage punk rock Laurel, being like, what do you do in response to fascism? Dye your hair, obviously, ‘cause that’s the thing. But also just this thing of like, I am going to be a different person now and I need to demarcate that somehow. And like do it in a way that’s a daily reminder. For the last month I wake up everyday and I’m like, hmm what’s the world? Oh right, fascism.

Of course, I did it at like 2 in the morning in like a PTSD state. So of course I woke up the next morning to go to work and was like oooh, that looks bad.”

It was during a subsequent touch up with Lauren that Laurel received a text from her band’s (Cassandra) drummer, “What are we going to do specifically about White Women? You’re an organizer? What do we do?”

“Well we make an event. I think I was texting her while Lauren was back there mixing up the color and I was like Lauren, concept. Let’s have big event that’s how to talk to other white people about white supremacy within the context of the election. Lauren was like, mmm hmm. Here’s my email, let’s do that.”

At this point in the interview we talked about assets based organizing, the idea that everyone should do the thing that they are already good at or inclined towards. Are you an organizer? Great. Do that. Or do you like to do research? Great! Do that. For example: Laurel’s friend who helped her with the “Calling It In” event is a nurse, so when she gets home she enjoys reading articles. Whereas for Laurel, she’s part of academia and reads heady shit all day. When she gets home that’s the last thing she wants to do for fun. Especially reading fake news. So her friend curated a syllabus, another created an agenda, as Laurel worked to organize the actual event. They had a resource packet, an agenda, and an event with enough food and chairs for everyone.

Laurel passed her plans and documents through different pedagogues, and educators, and people who think about how people learn. A week later the event happened. Thus proving that you don’t have to do everything alone, asking your friends/colleagues/idols for help is good and often necessary.

There is a self-awareness to Lauren’s way of facilitating a group that invites you to notice power and privilege in a way that brings you to the point on your own. Which is partly illustrated in our comes through in our discussion about the power dynamics of lesson planning versus agendas, the difference between facilitating a good conversation and teaching.

“There is a venn diagram where those two things overlap in major ways. But I think that in lesson planning, I mean, also think it’s a false dichotomy, I think they can be the same thing. But I often, when I lesson plan, am looking at sort of objectives of what I want the people who attend my class to understand at the end of the day. If it’s a lesson plan that’s a little more didactic, it will often be something that I already understand. I teach in the Arts Education Department at UCLA, so maybe that day I want them to understand the idea of “scaffolding” in a lesson plan. I already kinda get that because I’ve been teaching for a long time. But I’ll construct a lesson plan that’s like great, these people are going to walk out of the room understanding something I already have a grasp of. “

“With this agenda I don’t actually have the answers of how to talk to people other white people about White Supremacy. So it’s an agenda that facilitates a space for all of us to learn. And that’s not to say what when I’m doing a lesson plan I’m like, I don’t need to learn at all in this one! I already know everything! That’s never the case. I always learn things. I think that’s one of the nuanced distinctions.

And also, if it’s a lesson plan, there is an assumption that everybody’s showing up in the room self identifying as a student. And that means that they can position themselves in a way that is predicated on some openness to learning and whatever learning means for you as a process. With an organizing agenda, people might not show up in the room feeling like, I’m here to learn. They might show up feeling, I’m here to do. I’m here to like, get tools, I’m here to be action oriented. So that is a nuanced difference too. I don’t know I’m curious also about it. And I often teach people who are younger than me. And so there’s a built in dynamic there because of age. That is not the case when you’re doing community organizing with peers”

Hey Readers! Pause for reflection: What do you feel like you show up in a room as? Like, what is your default and is it helpful to you? Could you show up as a student more? Show up as a doer? A teacher?

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What’s giving you hope right now?

Lady bands, and the feminist LA rock scene. Also, youth culture and youth organizing with Standing Rock as an amazing example. And the Youth Justice Coalition here in LA as another amazing example. And another thing that is giving me hope is how much media is consistently coming out about mass incarceration and the abolition of the prison industrial complex I feel like that is becoming mainstreamed in a really major way and I think that is so awesome.

{watch 13th by the way, it’s on Netflix}

What is making you pop a vein right now?

The biggest thing is fighting in Facebook threads. If I could eliminate one thing in 2017… it would be Donald Trump. If I could eliminate two things it would be Donald Trump and the prison industrial complex. If I could eliminate 3 things it would be people fighting with each other in the Facebook comment threads. And I actually think that the third one is feasible, like just don’t do it. I just have a policy where if somebody starts to come at me in any way, in the comment threads I’m just like “let me know your phone number. I’d love to call you later and we can talk through this and have a conversation. But that mode of communicating I think is 100% ineffective. And is actually a strategy of the oppressors to try to distract us from the real work. It’s some smoke and mirrors shit and I’ve so had it.

Also I watched a video of Jennifer Lawrence in an interview with the BBC and she was telling a story about how she was filming in Hawaii and like her butt itched and so she scratched it on some sacred indigenous ancient stones and one of them got dislodged and rolled down the mountain and like almost killed one of her crew and she was laughing hysterically like it was the funniest story. And the white privilege just dripping on the whole scene made me also pop a vein. It was so gnarly and like there are so many things making me pop a vein, everything I read about Steve Bannon. But there was something about that one where it was so cloaked in Pop Culture and like as a culture maker and an artist, it’s like that is just as bad in my mind as almost more dangerous because its normalizing this white supremacist behavior and it’s almost worse because it’s not overt, it’s like coded.

What is something you’ve done since the election that makes you feel proud or like a badass?

“Calling It In” felt major because it helped me get past a lot of my own shit around perfectionism. I’m like a real perfectionist in the way I move through the world, and with this I was like this is too urgent, we don’t have time. You know what I mean? We need to get these tools out. We need to get things in the hands of people before Thanksgiving and to have that 2-week time frame, really activated me in a way where I couldn’t be paralyzed by a need to make it impressive, that’s another thing that I really succumb to. Like, is this going to be the most impressive toolkit in the history of communication theory? No. But is it going to help people do this work in a really urgent type of way? Yeah, I think so. So that felt really good.

I think the flipside of that coin is that I got to a point where I was like deriving a lot of purpose from doing invisible things. I was having the conversations that we had trained for in the workshop, but I wasn’t then like going back on Facebook and being like “I had a conversation today. Can I have some approval for being a good white person doing the work?” Nah, you just do it. I’ve really been thinking about what happens in the really invisible anonymous internal space of dismantling white supremacy in yourself. Where you’re just like I don’t need to announce this, I don’t need to broadcast this, I don’t need to do anything but feel a shift in me in terms of the way I move through the world and that has intrinsic value. So I think there’s been a lot of those moments where I’m like I’m gonna spend tonight just reading Angela Davis and I’m not going to fucking instagram the cover of the book. Do you know what I mean? I’m just gonna do it. And then I’m going to move through the world tomorrow having spent the night reading Angela Davis. And that is the thing. Like curing myself of my relationship to wanting to feel impressive or broadcasting. Or making choices about “broadcasting this is going to be helpful” because people need to know that phone banking for Foster Campbell is really important right now, you don’t need to broadcast this (other) thing because it’s just about you.

Developing a mechanism in myself where I can notice when I am spending more time posting about how people should phone bank than I actually am phone banking, it’s like check yourself.

Something you want to learn more about.

International Resistance movements.

It’s weird because when we talk about learning I automatically think I need to drop some like, fact. Did you know that these are the statistics? It’s weird because even though I’m an academic and a scholar, I don’t traffic in the realm of statistics and facts very often. I traffic in the world of culture and ideas more than anything.  And so I think the learning I’m trying to do is, is to situate this moment in like a global and historical context. And read about people who lived under Franco or under Pinochet. Or read biographies of Zapatistas. You know what I mean? To really understand what it is to embody resistance in a transcultural way and what we can learn from that. That’s something I’m starting to do a lot of scholarship about and that feels really useful. To understand that people have been doing this shit for so long in human history and all over the place. We’ve necessarily had to do it.

Something that you’ve learned about yourself.

I think the thing I learned in trying to put together “Calling It In” is about non violent resistance and non violent communication in the Civil Rights era. I sort of thought that I understood what that framework and posture was about. I saw Selma, I like get it! And then like really getting into MLK’s writing and understanding, there is this quote that he has about how non-violent communication is not passive it’s very active resistance to evil.

“If passive resistance means just passively accepting violence or injustice, if it means cowardice and stagnant passivity, then there is a difference, because nonviolent resistance does resist. It is dynamically active. It is passive physically, but it is strongly active spiritually.”  - MLK

Quote taken from an interview here  Similar quotes in Stride Toward Freedom

And these days this idea of shame, that’s a word in our psychotherapeutic wellness lexicon that has a lot of stigma about it. It’s like, oh shame, we don’t want to feel shame, but there’s this line that he has that is like, non-violent resistance is about awakening a sense of moral shame in the opponent. And that has been so useful to me. Because, when I’m engaged in one of these conversations I just believe sometimes that if you sat in a room for long even with with Mike Pence or my Trump supporting step dad or with whoever and just held a space with them for long enough so that they could hear themselves that they would break down with shame. I really believe that.

"Nonviolence does not seek to defeat or humiliate the opponent but to win friendship and understanding," King teaches. "The nonviolent resister must often express his protest through noncooperation or boycotts, but he realizes that these are not ends themselves; they are merely means to awaken a sense of moral shame in the opponent. ... The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community, while the aftermath of violence is tragic bitterness." MLK quote taken from here.

I think that you (Becky) and I work often with students who are in crisis in varying degrees. But there’s also another way to look at that word. I think people that voted for Trump are in a moral and ethical crisis. That they’ve done something that somewhere in their being they recognize that they have not acted in support of the highest human values of equity and justice. And that’s got to eat at their soul in some way.

This is like such a weird word to use but it’s really available to me right now. If we could be like the midwives for the birthing of that shame.

"An old world is dying, and a new one, kicking in the belly of it’s mother, time, announces that it is ready to be born. This birth will not be easy, and many of us are doomed to discover that we are exceedingly clumsy midwives. No matter, so long as we accept that our responsibility is to the newborn: the acceptance of responsibility contains the key to the necessarily evolving skill" - James Baldwin

What’s your preferred form of activism?

My preferred form of activism is music. Because I grew up as a punk in high school in the 90’s when the WTO was in Seattle. And it felt really clear to me that there was this tangible cultural effect. I think that the power of musical culture, the power of popular musicianship to influence collective psychology and to aestheticize the politic in a way that makes it embodied and makes it this lived experience. That there was something about having these people who I totally understood to be really profound political thinkers, when I was listening to Propaghandi whatever, I trust that these people are really incredibly educated, really understand the nuances of this political thing and they’re also telling me to wear a pyramid studded belt and a bandana and I’m gonna do it because that’s my personal resistance practice and it helps me. I think the line between performance and actually doing things is non-existent. And that’s been a part of my personal resistance practice right now. Is like dye my hair, wear camo everyday, do that because it cultivates in me an internal feeling of real resistance.

Because there’s so much that we can’t anticipate in terms of what’s going to happen next year, a lot of our work right now is like, spiritual. To kind of cultivate this internal state of solidity and resistance and clarity and steadfastness so that when the shitstorm comes we don’t get like sucked by the undertow. And I think that popular musicians kind of help represent a way of doing that. And I just know that in my fucking life, in my scholarship, those have been the people with the biggest impact. When you watch Bob Marley at the One Love Peace Concert bringing together the two heads of the opposing sides of the Jamaican civil war like shake hands on a stage in front of thousands of people. That just feels like the realest shit! Shaminism and politics and aesthetics and cultural organizing all intersecting at the same time.

Meanwhile, here’s Lauren just rocking her trade as we sit here. (as Lauren is slathering up Laurel’s Fighting Fascism Black hairdo)

What do you feel that you need prompting to do or that you feel uncomfortable doing?

I feel like I said, I’m not a statistician, I’m not inclined to facts, because I think the truth is kind of fuzzy and I sort of wish I had more of those available to me at my fingertips. But I need structure around that, around talking points and arming myself with those kinds of things because I’m not inclined towards that.

Something that I’m feeling a resistance to that I want to feel more inclined towards is being in spaces, I’m really comfortable in spaces with “people who agree with me” and I have skills in spaces who are on a completely different side. The place where I don’t have skills for is in like, in-fighting. In being in an organizing meeting where someone will say, “Well the problem with all of us progressives is…” and it starts to get internally toxic, I feel like I don’t quite yet have skills for how to be in that conversation and not let it shut me down. Like as soon as that happens I’m like, this isn’t the space that I want to participate in. And that really sucks because I think that  everybody needs a kind of healing, so at what point do I set boundaries?

I think I could use education around political processes. Because I think that this election made us lose so much faith in those processes. And so now all of these outcomes and action items, that are like well if you’re frustrated in this specific sub issue, vote. And it’s like … we did that. We tried to do that and it just proved itself not to work. So I think that is less about activism and more about some sort of like renewed faith in the electoral process. That is something I’m curious about trying to cultivate.

I’ve been thinking about the difference between a community and a scene, and really feeling like we need community right now. But I often feel like I’m showing up to something thinking it’s going to have more of a community ethos and it feels more like a scene. And I think that the semantic distinction is fuzzy but it’s something about this need to impress people. And a community is a place where you don’t need to impress anyone. And a scene is a place where you kind of do.

In the last month I’ve found myself in a lot of different organizing spaces. I went and phone banked for standing rock right across the street here and it was so community oriented,  there were points of entry and points of access for everybody. If you’re really comfortable doing this sort of work do this, if you’re comfortable doing that kind of work do that.

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Groups and resources you’d like us to shout out…

Women’s Center for Creative Work: They have a variety of workshops all the time but make sure to check out… Making Art During Fascism – Sundays 1-3pm.

“The woman (Beth Pikins) who runs it is a super amazing resource for artists who need to continue their practice in a way that is situated inside this moment. They I think are an example of community in that way I was talking about before where there’s like points of entry for anyone. They also house the Feminist Library on Wheels (FLOW) which I a great resource bank if you’re like I know I need to read something, don’t know what it is, just head over there and they’ll help you find the thing that you’re looking for.

SURJ - Showing Up for Racial Justice whose LA contingent is White People for Black Lives

I’m really interested in Shaun King’s Injustice Boycott. On the one hand there is not the level of transparency that I’m used to in community organizing and on the other hand I respect him so much that I’m finding ways to participate in it that feel really authentic to me and useful. And I think he represents something really exciting. And I think he represents ways that we can have questions about an initiative and still participate in it. Because if we just go into something whole hog behind anything with a leader in front of it then we’re not maintaining our own critical faculties. And we also really need leaders.

How do you feel about the need for a central icon? A Malcolm X? A Martin Luther King Jr? How do you feel about that kind of icon? Is that something that we are missing?

I am more interested in a coalition that feels like it has kinship and comradery to it. I would love for a statement to be released by Shaun King and Patrisse Cullors and Alicia Garza and Beyoncé and Barack Obama and Michelle Obama. All hanging out in a room together, having had a meeting. That’s what I’m really interested in, is icons who are like, we do different kinds of work and we represent different things but we all agree in this particular ethos. That’s something that I’d be really excited about. Because, I believe in icons. I believe on the people on the ball here and the power they have.

I think that we also live at a different time now where icons are everywhere. So I think that’s part of the reason that I’m interested in the idea of a coalition because I think it can model ways of being for the rest of us.

Taylor Swift, so problematic, like the worst AND I think that there was a moment where her performance of social identity, in terms of, I have this big group of girlfriends and it includes Lena Dunham, also so problematic everybody’s problematic, but the idea that an icon was embodying this model of sisterhood and like I roll with a big crew of women. That I think was Taylor’s one important contribution to the zeitgeist. Because we have this idea with icons, especially in gendered terms, we have this idea that men can be in bands but women either are solo acts or there’s like one with two backups. The role of the individual and the ego is problematic. So for Taylor to be like “we roll as a collective”, I think that was important. Celebrating the idea of sisterhood feels important to me.

We’re doing it! We’re witching out right now. And I think that’s back to the idea that there’s a point of entry for everyone. Y’know, we can’t do it all alone. I couldn’t have done “Calling It In” all by myself. But I kind of had to serve as the figurehead of it to make it happen. Solange does a great job of that, she does her performance work and at every moment acknowledges that she’s part of this collective. Cassandra’s trying to do that, to make sure that we always represent ourselves as a collective. That’s a culture shift. And it’s very feminist because it demystifies this myth of personality and individual success which is neo-liberalist capitalism. This idea that one person can pull themselves up by their bootstraps and do it all. No.

It takes a village…

Exactly. And, it takes a white privilege village to make one person believe that they can be individually successful.

Any art that you are enjoying?

That was the one thing about 2016 that was good. The albums that came out were so good. I mean, the Knowles sisters obviously made amazing things. I listened to Frank Ocean’s Blonde so much this year, I couldn’t stop, it’s like post-structural lyrical thing that was going on that really satisfied me. And also David Bowie’s last album and Leonard Cohen’s last album, and listening to all of the dearly departed has been really important artistically.

Lately, right now I really love music videos as a format. I think they are really healing and magical. In their short amount of time they can work their spell on you and I would say the music videos that are really working their spells on me right now are, there is a video out right now by a guy named Boogie – and the name of the video is, N—ga Needs. And there’s a video by Moses Sumney who’s an amazing artist called “Worth It” that’s really incredible. And also Anohni released a series of videos that has famous artists lip syncing to her songs that’s really incredible. And those 3 videos all really centralize the black body in the videos, in ways that are really powerful and really vulnerable at the same time. And I think that that is deeply important right now. When we’re talking about how are we going to do the work of dismantling racism in this country, like until we have just this hugest breadth of work in the broadest complexity of their human experience, and I think that power and vulnerability are two examples of that, that’s a big step.

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What do you think HRC is doing right now?

The first thing I thought of is her painting her nails. But like a color that Rhianna would wear. Or she’s hiking. Or she’s like eating something alone by herself and deriving tons of pleasure out of it. I’m a vegetarian, but I picture her eating like a roast chicken, the kind that you get at the store

Picking through the carcass

Yeah like with her hands! And she’s like this chicken is fucking delicious. That’s what I want. That’s what I think she is doing right now.

And really what she’s probably doing is some amazing policy analysis. Reading some piece of literature the rigor of which none of us could possibly apprehend. But I hope she’s eating a chicken.

What do you think Donald Trump’s doing right now?

Oh he’s cryyying. He’s crying naked and alone in the shower. He’s crying naked and afraid. No doubt about it. I’m 100% certain that that’s exactly what’s happening right now.

Thank you so much for the conversation Laurel, see you at more resistance events and music shows.

Calling It In: Resource Guide and Toolkit https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/0B16agwBiAyNtaGR6TmJYb3RWeVU

The Idiot’s Guide to the Roger Stone trial

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/the-idiots-guide-to-the-roger-stone-trial/

The Idiot’s Guide to the Roger Stone trial

Stone’s case will also be argued in front of a jury at the same time House Democrats escalate their own impeachment investigation into Trump by collecting evidence suggesting the president pressured Ukraine to assist his 2020 reelection bid. While the issues at the center of Stone’s trial are unrelated to the emerging Ukraine controversy, documents that circulated during the period since the GOP operative’s indictment actually fed some of the unfounded, Trump-boosted theories about Ukrainian involvement in the 2016 U.S. election.

When it’s all said and done, the four-decade-old Stone-Trump relationship could be tested like never before should Stone be convicted and the president faces pressure from his base to issue an election-year pardon.

Yeah, it’s enough to make one’s head spin. But don’t worry, POLITICO is here with your handy guide to the Roger Stone trial.

So what’s this all about again?

It seems like ages ago, but it was only January when Stone got indicted for lying to Congress and obstructing its 2016 Russia probe.

You may remember the predawn raid that CNN caught on film thanks to a reporter and cameraman who took a chance staking out Stone’s South Florida home. Or the fiery news conference Stone gave later that afternoon after his arrest and booking at the federal courthouse in Fort Lauderdale.

Turns out, the charges lodged against Stone were the last to come from Mueller before he closed up shop less than two months later. Fast forward to November. Jurors over the next two to three weeks will be asked to determine Stone’s guilt or innocence on seven counts that essentially boil down to whether he obstructed House Intelligence Committee investigators starting in mid-2017 with false testimony, lying about having relevant records and then tampering with another witness.

Stone has pleaded not guilty to the charges and has been out on bond since his initial arrest.

I thought Mueller was done, will I learn anything new from the trial?

There’s a good chance.

Between the final Mueller report and a series of lengthy indictments, the now-former special counsel has laid out a plethora of evidence about Russian election interference aimed at boosting Trump. But his office never went to trial in any of its cases focused on Russian meddling, WikiLeaks or the congressional probes into those efforts (recall that former campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s trial last year was over bank fraud and tax evasion).

That means Stone’s trial will be the first time those Russia-related issues will be laid out in front of a jury, although U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who’s overseeing the case, made clear Monday she wants to keep things focused on Stone’s alleged false statements and obstruction of justice. She’s likely loath to let the trial devolve into a squabble over unfounded conspiracies about who hacked the Democrats’ emails and then released them in the thick of the 2016 White House race, or the Trump campaign’s possible links to Russian intermediaries.

That might be hard, though.

One mystery that might come up is an oblique reference in the Mueller report to Trump receiving a phone call from an unidentified person in the summer of 2016 who seems to have informed him about upcoming email dumps that would hurt his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. Rick Gates, a key Manafort deputy who is expected to testify during the Stone trial, was in the car with Trump at the time. Redactions in the Mueller report suggest Stone’s involvement in the episode.

The trial could also shed more light on Stone’s interactions with the online persona Guccifer 2.0 — a Russian front, according to intelligence officials — that was behind the release of hacked Democratic emails.

“please tell me if i can help u anyhow. it would be a great pleasure to me,” the mysterious Guccifer wrote in a private message to Stone amid the releases.

Does this matter for impeachment?

Stone’s trial inevitably has overlap with the Democratic impeachment effort, which centers on the president pressuring Ukraine’s leaders to launch investigations into his political opponents.

That connection is all about CrowdStrike, the cyberfirm that the Democratic National Committee hired to investigate its email breach during the 2016 campaign.

In his much-scrutinized July 25 phone call with Ukraine’s president, Trump raised the idea that Kyiv could do him a “favor” by launching an investigation into the company over its work during the last presidential election.

Trump’s request appears to have originated from a conspiracy theory Stone has been pushing in his own legal defense. According to Stone’s court filings, the government relied only on the “inconclusive and unsubstantiated” CrowdStike report when it blamed Russia for the DNC hack, failing to collect any direct evidence from the DNC itself.

Department of Justice prosecutors countered that they did in fact reach their conclusions independently. Yet the unfounded allegations continue to linger as part of broader baseless conspiracies about CrowdStrike’s ties to Ukraine and whether the company somehow helped frame Russia for the hacks.

During a pretrial hearing Monday, Jackson warned Stone’s attorneys not to stray into such territory, noting the case to be argued before the jury has nothing to do with the Russian hackings.

Even if the hacks heard round the world don’t come up, the trial’s optics and outcome will inevitably play into the impeachment debate.

Trump and his GOP allies would celebrate a Stone acquittal as more proof that the Mueller investigation was an ill-premised “witch hunt” that has morphed into the current impeachment inquiry.

Democrats are also keeping close tabs on Stone. House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff, who’s leading the Democrats’ impeachment probe, cited Stone’s court case in a letter last month to lawmakers defending his use of closed-door depositions as he gathers information about Trump’s Ukraine pressure campaign. The strategy has been a major point of contention for Republicans.

“It is of paramount importance to ensure that witnesses cannot coordinate their testimony with one another to match their description of events, or potentially conceal the truth,” the California Democrat wrote.

Who are the key players at the trial?

Mueller may be long gone, but his fingerprints are all over this case.

The special counsel handed off its Stone file to the U.S. attorneys’ office in Washington, D.C., which during the trial will be represented by two career federal prosecutors, Michael Marando and Jonathan Kravis. But they will be joined at the government’s table by former Mueller lawyers Aaron Zelinsky and Adam Jed, who have since returned to jobs at the Justice Department.

For his part, Stone is leaning on a team of South Florida-based lawyers that includes Bruce Rogow, a First Amendment expert who in the early 1990s represented the rap group 2 Live Crew; Robert Buschel, a well-known defense attorney in Broward County and an aspiring novelist; and Grant Smith, whose father, Larry Smith, served in Congress as a Florida Democrat.

Judge Jackson’s name may sound familiar, too. The Obama appointee who took the bench in 2011 has been at the center of Mueller-led cases dealing with Manafort, Gates and Alex van der Zwaan, a Dutch attorney whose 30-day jail sentence made him the first person to go to prison in the Mueller probe.

Prosecutors designated Stone’s case as related to those earlier ones, which caused it to be assigned to Jackson. Stone’s attorneys were apparently eager to have it reassigned and fought the designation, but she turned down their request.

Who’s going to be on the witness stand?

Prepare for Trumpworld to descend on the D.C. courthouse.

Bannon, the former Trump 2016 campaign manager, is likely to give testimony describing his communications with Stone during the campaign.

Bannon and Stone have bad blood going back at least a couple years. Stone publicly advocated for Bannon’s firing from the White House by calling him “a spent force” who was more focused on self-promotion than helping Trump fulfill his campaign promises.

“He did a lot to help himself but not much to help us,” Stone declared at the time. Bannon was axed the next day.

The two men’s feud continued into the fall of 2018, when a report emerged that Bannon had testified to a grand jury investigating Stone. The longtime GOP operative fired back with a brutal Daily Caller column entitled, “The Treachery of Steve Bannon.”

Another key witness will be Randy Credico, the therapy dog-toting liberal talk show host. Credico was close to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and Stone pumped him for information about the website’s plans to release damaging emails pilfered from Clinton’s campaign. Credico’s decision not to testify before Congress is central to the government’s charge that Stone tried to intimidate a witness. DOJ prosecutors said they intend to question Credico about Stone’s text messages from April 2018 telling him he would “take that dog away from you” and also urging him to “do a Frank Pentangeli.” The latter is a reference to a scene from the “Godfather Part II” in which a character backtracks on giving Congress incriminating testimony about the Corleone crime family.

Other figures expected on the stand include Gates, the deputy Trump campaign chairman who was indicted in 2017 on a slew of charges alongside Manafort, his longtime boss. Gates pleaded guilty to two felony charges early last year and has been assiduously cooperating with prosecutors in a bid to minimize his yet-to-be-determined sentence.

A potential wild card witness is Jerome Corsi, a conspiracy-minded author who exchanged emails with Stone about reaching out to Assange while the WikiLeaks founder was cooped up at the time at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Corsi appears to have come close to facing criminal charges of his own in the Mueller probe. He announced a year ago that he turned down the Mueller team’s bid to have him plead guilty to perjury. Corsi was never charged.

And given Stone’s attention-seeking reputation, many outside observers expect he will indeed take the witness stand in his defense. It’s a risky move that most people in his position wouldn’t take.

But “Roger Stone is definitely not like most,” said Annemarie McAvoy, a former Gates defense attorney. “He loves the spotlight, and he likely feels no one can explain better than him why he is not guilty of anything.”

What’s Stone’s defense?

We’ll find out during the trial, but Stone and his attorneys have telegraphed at least some of their case over the past 10 months.

Some of the legal wrangling has been totally unrelated to actual charges.

In July, Jackson banned Stone from using Facebook, Twitter or any social media after he had been hauled before the judge several times over his commentary about the case. Most notably, Stone got in trouble for an Instagram post in February that appeared to show a gun’s crosshairs above a picture of Jackson’s head, prompting Stone to take the witness stand and issue an apology.

As for the actual merits of the charges, Stone’s attorneys have argued that their client was selectively prosecuted because of his politics. But that hasn’t exactly gone over well with the judge, either. In August, Jackson denied a motion to dismiss the case, saying Stone’s arguments were “made up out of whole cloth.”

Still, don’t expect Stone to cave.

He has been helping fund his legal defense by selling $33 T-shirts that declare he “did nothing wrong!” Stone has also sent repeated signals he has no intention of pleading guilty or flipping on Trump.

“There’s nothing I could tell them that could be damaging to the president,” he told POLITICO in May 2018. Close friends see no change to that stance now.

“Roger is committed to taking this all the way through to the end because he believes in America,” said Michael Caputo, a former Trump 2016 campaign aide and longtime Stone friend who is planning to attend the D.C. trial. “This whole rotten system that they called justice has never encountered a man like Roger Stone. Cause he’s got balls the size of maracas buddy and he believes in this country in his marrow.”

What’s Stone looking at if he’s convicted?

In theory, the 67-year-old Stone could be put away for life — but don’t expect that.

While Stone could face up to 50 years, his actual potential sentence would likely be much less than the maximum.

If Stone is found guilty on any of the counts, Jackson will have to calculate the sentencing guidelines. She isn’t obligated to follow them, however. The guidelines could vary dramatically depending on the ultimate conviction, meaning the range could fall anywhere from just a few months to several years. Notably, judges almost never give near the maximum in these type of white-collar cases.

Any Stone jail sentence would inevitably set up the question of a presidential pardon or commutation as the 2020 campaign kicks into full swing.

For Trump’s part, he appears to have been following along. In January, Trump fired off a series of tweets after Stone’s indictment questioning why the special counsel had targeted his longtime associate but not turned the focus back on prominent former law enforcement officials and Clinton.

Then he added, “Roger Stone didn’t even work for me anywhere near the Election!”

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Dickheads of the Month: November 2017

As it seems that there are people who say or do things that are remarkably dickheaded yet somehow people try to make excuses for them or pretend it never happened, here is a collection of some of the dickheaded actions we saw in the month of November 2017 to make sure that they are never forgotten.

Starting off with the low-hanging fruit that is the Tory party, we had Chancellor Philip Hammond state that there are no unemployed people in the UK - which was news to the 1.6m unemployed people in the UK.

Then we had Jacob Rees-Mogg exercise the remarkable double standard of being one of the 313 ministers who voted that animals are not sentient and cannot feel pain - then within a week stated that bullfighting was cruel and should be banned.  In other words, it's cruel when Spaniards butcher a live animal for their entertainment, but it isn’t when a fox is torn to pieces for the entertainment of the landed gentry - the landed gentry who happen to not just be a core part of the Tory vote, but a fair number of their MPs as well.

On top of that we had serial fuck up merchant Boris Johnson manage to add five years to the prison sentence of a British national currently incarcerated in Iran by not reading the dossier on the charges that  Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was facing and issuing a statement where he managed to confirm those same charges in a few short seconds, which the Iranian authorities promptly used as proof.  Add to that his so-called apology where he blamed everyone but himself for the situation where he even had the gall to say “I’m sorry if...” his comments had caused distress, as if you have to be thin-skinned to not want to spend an additional five years in jail because a Foreign Secretary cannot do his job correctly.

And of course, it would be remiss of me to not mention Priti Patel, who when it was discovered that she’d snuck off to Israel to have discussions with Israeli ministers without the government’s knowledge or approval, attempted to lie her way out of it by claiming it was a holiday.  Having refused the clear opportunity she was given to resign, she scuttled off to Uganda while her assistant had to cop the flak in Parliament while a few supporters thought it was wise to issue threats that she would cause a lot of damage if she was sacked that didn't in any way look like an attempt at blackmail.  She was promptly recalled from her trip to Uganda and bluntly told to offer her resignation. 

Making a second appearance on the list, once more we have Jacob Rees-Mogg as it emerged that he had a meeting with Steve Bannon to discuss a potential election campaign along the lines of the one Bannon masterminded for Trump.  This missed two obvious issues, namely how Rees-Mogg isn't Tory leader, and the fact that the Tories already ran a campaign remarkably similar to the one Bannon used for Trump - for Zac Goldsmith’s losing Mayor of London campaign.

Frontman of one of the most overrated bands of all time Morrissey covered himself in glory when mouthing off in defence of Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey and looking like a complete bellend in the process - and then, having been called out for his bellendedness, flounced off saying he would never do another print interview ever again.

In the wake of the Texas church shootings, noted far right bumblefuck Peter Sweden demanded that people stop trying to politicise the tragedy just because a white middle class American shot and killed 25 people.  They obviously failed to comprehend that it wouldn’t take long before people would unearth his earlier tweets where Peter Sweden was politicising mass shootings when it fit his anti-migrant agenda.  Luckily several dozen people helpfully pointed this out to him.

The producers of Newsnight did a superb job of lying to the British public by airing a clip which they claimed was Jeremy Corbyn responding to the autumn Budget - but it was soon unearthed that what they had done was edited in a clip from a completely unrelated debate from several months previously, which eagle-eyed viewers were quick to point out to them.

Also at the BBC, we had Andrew Neil getting into a Twitter spat when somebody told him he had got his facts hopelessly wrong in a report about the German elections.  Neil attempted the lamest of lame duck comebacks, saying the person he was in the spat with had not been paying attention to the German media’s coverage of the story...because he didn’t take five seconds to check that the person he was debating with was not just a political blogger from Germany, but also a member of their Green party.

A quite remarkable amount of dickheadedness emanated from Electronic Art and their handling of Star Wars Battlefront II.  Not only did they push the loot box agenda so much further than any other developer has, to the point that progression was a painfully slow process for people who didn’t pay to unlock characters such as Darth Vader or Luke Skywalker (with it taking an estimated forty hours of play to unlock each character) and when they removed the loot boxes due to the massive backlash they didn't rejig the system which meant everyone playing it now had to grind like nobody’s business, but things really got absurd when their initial defence for these practises was to blame the Star Wars lore for it.  And that’s not to mention the features that were available on the first Battlefront that aren't in Battlefront II.

The Twitter user who posts under the name Educating Liberals did a fine job of making their Twitter handle fair game by claiming that today’s generation would claim that Charles Manson was a misunderstood civil rights leader, a sentiment which led to all manner of “So true” sentiments in response.  One slight problem with that theory: it was neo-Nazi groups holding up Manson as a misunderstood civil rights leader who was framed by the corrupt system.

On the subject of Manson, there’s also every single person who confused Charles Manson with Marilyn Manson.  Good luck every single one of you claiming you were “reeling in” people who thought you were genuine...

Angry game developer Andrew Watt did so much to boost his future prospects by deciding the reason that Steam terminated his account had nothing to do with him posting asset flipped games and being abusive to Steam users who were critical of said game, but all because Youtuber SidAlpha brought his shady behaviour to wider attention - which justified a campaign of stalkerish behaviour such as posting impersonator Twitter accounts, abusing Youtube’s report systems to claim SidAlpha had violated his privacy, and enlisting the help of fellow headcase and career suicide enthusiast Alex Mauer to assist him in his endeavours.  

On the subject of people who amply demonstrate the grossly overused term “snowflake” is far more suited to them than the people they rant and rave about, The Daily Mail responded to Paperchase pulling their sponsorship with the paper after a wave of criticism by accusing the Stop Funding Hate campaign of “bullying” - even though you can choose from so many Mail front pages from the past eighteen months as an example of bullying.

Some mutually assured dickheadishness from Superdrug and Zoella for selling an advent calendar of beauty products that only lasted for twelve days then charging £50 for it - even though the combined total for the products contained within the calendar was £20.

And last but by no means least, we have Donald Trump who managed to outdo his usual dickheadishness by causing a minor diplomatic incident with both the UK and the Netherlands by retweeting Britain First material, and followed that up by harassing a mother from Dorset because he doesn’t even know what Theresa may’s Twitter handle is before harassing her to his army of mindless apes.

November 28, 2017

It’s time for another night of politics, and this time we have a question inspired by two of my friends.  It’s a pretty simple one, to wit:

“After the past year, why do people still support Donald Trump?”

Well, there are a number of reasons, as one might expect.  To avoid the hordes of people that just voted against Clinton, we’re focusing here on the ones that are actively still on Team Trump.  Of those, we’ll start with the first and largest group:

1) Those that like him because he has an R after his name instead of a D.  I don’t know that it’s possible to overstate how tribalistic humanity has remained throughout the millennia.  That Us vs. Them mentality infuses every aspect of our lives, from things as major as us being okay with going to war with tiny countries halfway around the world because they’re such a threat to our way of life somehow to things as silly as your coworkers making fun of each other over their favored sports team doing poorly despite neither of them being on said team.  The majority of voters in our country don’t actually bother learning about the issues and cast an educated vote, they just go for the candidate from their tribe, because that’s easier than thinking.

2) Those that are one issue voters, and that issue is the economy.  The economy is still improving month after month, and although we’re starting to see a lot of warning signs that it might be about to peak, for the time being it’s still getting better.  And before you point out that we had seven and a half years of straight economic growth under Obama, keep in mind that none of that counts because the Conventional Wisdom is that the economy is healthier under Republican presidents, the massive recessions under the Reagan and Bush Jr. administrations be damned.

3) Those that are one issue voters, and that issue is gun rights.  Every presidential election we’ve had in my lifetime has had the same conspiracy theories about how the Democratic candidate is going to ban all of our guns if elected president.  We’ve had four terms of Democratic presidents in that time, and nothing even remotely resembling that has been attempted, and yet each campaign the NRA goes into overdrive warning everyone that this time they’re totally not just lying, you guys.  And every time they convince millions of people that they’re actually telling the truth this time, all past evidence be damned.

4) The voters that want America to be whites only.  You know what turned out to be the best way to determine who was and was not going to vote for Trump?  It wasn’t their race, age, gender, or income level.  It was whether or not they believed Obama was secretly from Kenya.  These are the people that saw him announce his presidential candidacy with a speech about how he was going to kick over ten million brown people out of the country, and thought they had finally found a candidate that spoke to them.  Since being elected, some of the best (only) successes he’s had as president have been in regards to dramatically ramping up deportations, making it harder for people to immigrate or visit/move here in the first place, and bringing back the kinds of long-discredited police policies like the War on Drugs and “broken windows” policing that put a disproportionately high number of minorities in prison.  For those voters, Trump is doing just fine.

5) Those that believe in the mantra that government is the problem.  A lot of people believe that the country would be better if we had as borderline nonexistent a government as possible, and Trump has made some pretty huge strides in making that happen.  He’s so far gutted the State Department and the Environmental Protection Agency to the point where it will take decades before either department fully recovers, and has headed several other departments with thoroughly incompetent people like Betsy DeVos and Ben Carson to make them as toothless as possible.  The military is about the only place where he’s placed competent people at the top, so for anyone of a more libertarian bent that thinks our federal government should be mainly focused on the military and little else, his administration is working towards their dream.

6) Those that just want to watch the world burn.  Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon has stated that the only way to achieve his vision for the country is by causing a total collapse of the nation so that it can be rebuilt the way he wants.  If that sounds insane to you, try to think back to the year or so after The Dark Knight came out, and think of how many of your friends shared memes quoting the Joker like he was filled with sage wisdom instead of just being some douchey teenage nihilist and you’ll see who this mindset appeals to.  There are way too many people out there that never outgrew that phase.

Now, I’m sure there are other reasons people are still supporting him, but I will level with you: every single Trump supporter I’ve encountered this year, in person, online, or in print has encompassed one or more of these six main themes.  If you’re a supporter of his and none of the above reasons applies to you, feel free to let me know and I’ll update the list.

GOP MULLS MOORE PROBLEM — TRUMP heads home — SESSIONS floats Clinton special counsel — REBECCA BERG joins CNN, JIM COMEY signs with Washington Speakers Bureau — ELI STOKOLS and ELENA SCHNEIDER engaged

PRESIDENT TRUMP is on his way back to Washington after 12 days in Asia. He’ll stop in Hawaii. On Thursday, he comes to the Hill to speak to the House Republican Conference, timed to their vote for tax reform. The press charter is scheduled to land at Andrews 5:40 a.m. Wednesday.

— TRUMP, speaking on Air Force One, addressed the three UCLA basketball players arrested for theft in China: “The basketball players, by the way — I know a lot of people are asking — I will tell you, when I heard about it two days ago, I had a great conversation with President Xi. What they did was unfortunate. You know, you’re talking about very long prison sentences. They do not play games. He was terrific, and they’re working on it right now. And hopefully everything is going to work out. And I know they’re very grateful because they were told exactly what happened.”

Story Continued Below

Good Tuesday morning. THE SENATE ON ROY MOORE… — “Moore expulsion idea splits Senate Republicans,” by Seung Min Kim and John Bresnahan: “Senate Republicans are escalating their demands for embattled Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore to leave the race, including a growing faction calling for him to be expelled if he wins next month. But some senior Republicans are wary that the chorus of anti-Moore sentiment from Washington will only embolden Moore and his supporters. … Sen. Cory Gardner of Colorado, chairman of the [NRCC], raised the specter of expulsion in a Monday statement. Later, retiring Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona told reporters he would support Democrat Doug Jones over Moore and that expelling Moore should remain on the table.

“But other top party leaders weren’t as quick to embrace the idea of expelling Moore from the chamber, which has been attempted but not completed in well more than a century and could raise serious questions about the Senate defying the will of voters. Other Republicans fear the precedent of booting a senator who hasn’t violated any Senate rules or is not facing criminal charges.” http://politi.co/2yZiIlK

**SUBSCRIBE to Playbook: http://politi.co/2lQswbh

— THE WHITE HOUSE … NYT’s Jonathan Martin and Sheryl Gay Stolberg: “Publicly, Mr. McConnell, appearing at a news conference in Louisville, said he was ‘looking at’ drafting a write-in candidate for the Dec. 12 special election. Privately, Mr. McConnell was doing more than merely looking. One idea being discussed, first brought up by two different White House officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity, would be for Attorney General Jeff Sessions to run as either a write-in candidate or to be appointed to what was his seat should Mr. Moore win and be immediately removed from office.

“Mr. McConnell is supportive of the idea and discussed it on Monday in a telephone call with Vice President Mike Pence that was chiefly about the Republican tax overhaul proposal, according to party officials briefed on the call. Mr. Sessions remains popular among Alabama Republicans, but his relationship with Mr. Trump has frayed since he recused himself from the investigation of the role that Russia played in last year’s presidential campaign.” http://nyti.ms/2morPqi

— THE PARTY COMMITTEE … “The Republican National Committee Hasn’t Yet Dumped Roy Moore,” by BuzzFeed’s Henry J. Gomez: “About a dozen national party staffers are on the ground in Alabama, handling field organizing duties for next month’s special election between Moore and Democratic nominee Doug Jones, an RNC official told BuzzFeed News. A spokesperson declined to comment when asked if the RNC’s investment was being reevaluated in light of another woman coming forward to accuse Moore of sexually assaulting her in 1977, when she was 16.” http://bzfd.it/2yZk2VU

— THE MOST RECENT ALLEGATIONS, from Gabe Debenedetti in New York. http://politi.co/2htQmER

NOTES ON MOORE …

— SOME COMPLICATING FACTORS WITH PUSHING MOORE OUT: Early votes and absentee ballots that have already been counted are irreversible. So if you’ve voted for Roy Moore, you can’t change your vote.

— HOW MUCH WOULD A WRITE-IN CAMPAIGN COST REPUBLICANS? A write-in campaign is tricky. The GOP will have to run some ads or spread the message somehow that voters should write in someone — perhaps Jeff Sessions — instead of voting for Moore. But it runs the risk of splitting the Republican vote, and handing the election to Doug Jones, the Democrat.

— WHY JEFF SESSIONS MAKES SENSE. Air time is cheap in Alabama, and Sessions has high name ID. If Trump gets behind him, that could make a big difference.

— IF SESSIONS TAKES THE LEAP, WHO DOES TRUMP CHOOSE AS ATTORNEY GENERAL? Trump has a very aggressive legislative agenda, and if he needs to choose a new attorney general, that will take time and political capital. To get a new attorney general confirmed with minimal pain, Trump would have to listen to McConnell’s suggestions about who can get through the chamber easily.

— EXPULSION IS HARD — BUT CAN IT BE WORTH IT POLITICALLY? Expulsion takes a while. It’s tricky. The Senate hasn’t expelled a member in more than a century. But is there an argument to be made that Republicans would be better off electing Moore, expelling him and getting Alabama’s Republican governor to appoint another GOP senator? That way two Republicans don’t split the vote. And Republicans get to actually take action to expel someone whose behavior they say they find abhorrent.

— … BUT, BUT, BUT: If the Senate has to expel Moore, it could tear the party apart even further and embolden Steve Bannon in his war against incumbents. And it could look like the Senate is subverting the will of the voters.

BY THE WAY … REMEMBER — NOVEMBER was supposed to be all about tax reform. Republicans don’t want to be talking about whether their Senate candidate in Alabama had an unusual interest in high school girls.

CARL HULSE’S “ON WASHINGTON” — “Past Sex Scandals Show McConnell Is Willing to Take a Tough Line”: “Senator Mitch McConnell has a well-documented history of showing little tolerance for sex scandals that he fears could tarnish the image of the Senate and his party. He was a major force behind the effort to push out Larry E. Craig, the Idaho Republican arrested at the Minneapolis airport in 2007 in an undercover sex sting. And he was the chairman of the ethics committee when Senator Bob Packwood, the powerful Oregon Republican, resigned in 1995 under threat of expulsion after he was accused of sexual harassment.” http://nyti.ms/2iT6ikk

EDITORIAL ON AL.COM — WEBSITE FOR THE BIRMINGHAM NEWS, PRESS-REGISTER (MOBILE) and THE HUNTSVILLE TIMES — “Our view: Roy Moore grossly unfit for office”: “Roy Moore simply cannot be a U.S. Senator. Even if his party and many of its adherents still think it possible, it is unthinkable — for his state, and his country.” http://bit.ly/2ieYl9H

NEW POLITICO/MORNING CONSULT POLL — “Poll: Moore should quit Alabama Senate race,” by Steven Shepard: “A new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll shows voters nationally find the allegations against Alabama Republican Senate nominee Roy Moore credible — and a majority thinks Moore should drop out of the race. The poll — which was conducted prior to the most recent allegations against Moore leveled by Beverly Young Nelson, who said Monday that Moore sexually assaulted her when she was 16 years old — found 59 percent of voters say they considered the original allegations against Moore outlined in a Washington Post article last week very or somewhat credible. Just 17 percent say the allegations are not too credible or not credible at all. The remaining 23 percent don’t know or have no opinion.

“There are partisan differences in national views of the Moore allegations, but even among Republican voters, more find the allegations credible than not. Nearly half of GOP voters, 49 percent, say the accusations against Moore are at least somewhat credible; just three-in-10 say they are not too credible or not credible at all.” http://politi.co/2jpLc0Q

****** A message from Chevron: We’re piloting a program that uses drones to keep an eye on Chevron wells, tanks, and pipelines—all to keep DOERS and what they’re doin’ safer. Watch the video: http://politi.co/2zOnTVE ******

A SIGN OF THINGS TO COME — @gdebenedetti: “Moore is already a 2018 issue >> • O’Rourke — Cruz challenger in TX — has sent nonstop $ emails about him (just now: ‘We deserve better than a Senator who will stand by an accused child predator’) • Kaine also hitting opponent over support (‘Sexual abuse is not a partisan issue’)”.

— @jaketapper: “How many high school yearbooks have you signed since you graduated high school?”

DRIP, DRIP, DRIP — “Gadsden locals say Moore’s predatory behavior at mall, restaurants not a secret,” by Anna Claire Vollers in AL.com: “Roy Moore’s penchant for flirting with teen girls was ‘common knowledge’ and ‘not a big secret’ around Gadsden, according to some area residents. … [Blake] Usry, who was a teenager at the time, remembers seeing Moore at the mall often. ‘He would go and flirt with all the young girls,’ he said. ‘It’d seem like every Friday or Saturday night (you’d see him) walking around the mall, like the kids did.’

“Jason Nelms, who now lives in Tennessee but grew up in nearby Southside, was a regular at the mall when he was a teenager. He recalled being told by a mall employee that they kept watch for an older guy who was known to pick up younger girls. … [Greg] Legat, now 59, said an off-duty Gadsden police officer named J.D. Thomas told him about various people he should look out for when he was working. This was around 1981, and Thomas worked security at the mall. One of the people was a pickpocket, he said, while another was someone prone to pick fights. One was Roy Moore. ‘I asked him, “What did he do?”’ Legat recalled. ‘He said, “If you see him, let me know. I’ll take care of it.”’ http://bit.ly/2zWFrz1

— “Locals Were Troubled by Roy Moore’s Interactions with Teen Girls at the Gadsden Mall,” by Charles Bethea on NewYorker.com: “This past weekend, I spoke or messaged with more than a dozen people — including a major political figure in the state — who told me that they had heard, over the years, that Moore had been banned from the mall because he repeatedly badgered teen-age girls. Some say that they heard this at the time, others in the years since. These people include five members of the local legal community, two cops who worked in the town, several people who hung out at the mall in the early eighties, and a number of former mall employees. (A request for comment from the Moore campaign was not answered.)” http://bit.ly/2AHG24A

HOW BREITBART IS FRAMING THE MOORE RACE — “Breitbart editor: Moore scandal ‘represents so much beyond one race’,” by Jason Schwartz: “The editor of Breitbart News says the Alabama Senate contest ‘represents so much beyond one race,’ and that his reporters will continue to investigate the claims made by the women who have alleged that Republican nominee Roy Moore assaulted or pursued relationships with them as teenagers.

“‘We admit our biases,’ Breitbart Editor in Chief Alex Marlow said. ‘I’ll tell you that we would like to see a populist, nationalist, America first conservative get elected.’ ‘There are so many people who want Judge Moore to not become the senator from Alabama, and it’s not just Democrats, it’s the Republican establishment, it’s the media establishment,’ he said. ‘And what happens in Alabama, either side is going to use it to claim momentum heading into 2018. It’s a hugely significant race.’” http://politi.co/2zXmn3B

CONGRESS POLICING THEMSELVES — “Congress yet to act on flawed anti-harassment system,” by Elana Schor: “Senators in both parties are touting their move last week to require sexual harassment training for all members and aides. What they don’t mention is that many Senate offices already required training or were moving toward it — and that their vote did nothing to reform a system for handling complaints that critics say deters victims from coming forward. Now, some lawmakers are fighting to ensure that the Senate’s unanimous approval of mandatory training doesn’t make further reforms harder by offering political cover to members who would prefer to move on. Bipartisan talks on an overhaul of the Capitol’s harassment policy, which critics in and out of Congress say is stacked against victims, remain in their early stages.” http://politi.co/2iTo2wh

ANOTHER SPECIAL COUNSEL? — “Sessions raises specter of special counsel on Clinton and uranium,” by Josh Gerstein: “Attorney General Jeff Sessions is raising the possibility of naming a new special counsel to investigate potential wrongdoing by the Clinton Foundation, according to a letter the Justice Department sent Monday to House Republicans. … ‘The Attorney General has directed senior federal prosecutors to evaluate certain issues raised in your letters,’ Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd said in the letter obtained by POLITICO and sent to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), among others.

“‘These senior prosecutors will report directly to the Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General, as appropriate, and will make recommendations as to whether any matters not currently under investigation should be opened, whether any matters currently under investigation, require further resources, or whether any matters merit the appointment of a Special Counsel,’ Boyd added.” http://politi.co/2AJABSL … The letter http://bit.ly/2zWPS5v

PENCE WATCH — “Pence’s health care power play: The vice president is driving a White House agenda dominated by the conservative, anti-regulatory policies he embraced as Indiana governor,” by Adam Cancryn: “Vice President Mike Pence is exerting growing influence over the American health care system, overseeing the appointments of more than a half-dozen allies and former aides to positions driving the White House’s health agenda. On Monday President Donald Trump nominated Alex Azar, a former Indianapolis-based drug executive and longtime Pence supporter as HHS secretary. If confirmed, Azar would join an Indiana brain trust that already includes CMS Administrator Seema Verma and Surgeon General Jerome Adams. “Two of Verma’s top deputies — Medicaid director Brian Neale and deputy chief of staff Brady Brookes — are former Pence hands as well, as is HHS’ top spokesman, Matt Lloyd. Yet another Pence ally — Indiana state Sen. Jim Merritt — is in the running to be White House drug czar.” http://politi.co/2AH3AXt

TROUBLE IN PARADISE — “GOP megadonor Adelson publicly breaks with Bannon,” by Alex Isenstadt and Josh Dawsey: “Las Vegas casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, the GOP’s most prominent megadonor, is publicly breaking with former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon over his efforts to oust Republican incumbents in 2018. ‘The Adelsons will not be supporting Steve Bannon’s efforts,’ said Andy Abboud, an Adelson spokesman. ‘They are supporting Mitch McConnell 100 percent. For anyone to infer anything otherwise is wrong.’ The public pronouncement comes about a month after Adelson met with Bannon in Washington. …

“The former White House chief strategist appeared before the Zionist Organization of America’s annual dinner on Sunday night. ZOA is heavily funded by Adelson. … Bannon had been slated to introduce Adelson and his spouse, Miriam, at the event, according to a copy of the program. The Adelsons, however, did not make it to the event, one person close to the couple said — in part because Adelson was concerned that appearing publicly with Bannon would be seen as a tacit endorsement of his efforts.” http://politi.co/2zWLh3x

WHAT EVERYONE IS TALKING ABOUT — JULIA IOFFE in The Atlantic, “The Secret Correspondence Between Donald Trump Jr. and WikiLeaks”: “Just before the stroke of midnight on September 20, 2016, at the height of last year’s presidential election, the WikiLeaks Twitter account sent a private direct message to Donald Trump Jr., the Republican nominee’s oldest son and campaign surrogate. ‘A PAC run anti-Trump site putintrump.org is about to launch,” WikiLeaks wrote. ‘The PAC is a recycled pro-Iraq war PAC. We have guessed the password. It is ‘putintrump.’ See ‘About’ for who is behind it. Any comments?’ (The site, which has since become a joint project with Mother Jones, was founded by Rob Glaser, a tech entrepreneur, and was funded by Progress for USA Political Action Committee.)

“The next morning, about 12 hours later, Trump Jr. responded to WikiLeaks. ‘Off the record I don’t know who that is, but I’ll ask around,’ he wrote on September 21, 2016. ‘Thanks.’ The messages, obtained by The Atlantic, were also turned over by Trump Jr.’s lawyers to congressional investigators. They are part of a long—and largely one-sided—correspondence between WikiLeaks and the president’s son that continued until at least July 2017. … ‘Strongly suggest your dad tweets this link if he mentions us,’ WikiLeaks [messaged Don Jr. on Oct. 12, 2016], pointing Trump Jr. to the link wlsearch.tk, which it said would help Trump’s followers dig through the trove of stolen documents and find stories.

“‘There’s many great stories the press are missing and we’re sure some of your follows [sic] will find it,’ WikiLeaks went on. ‘Btw we just released Podesta Emails Part 4.’ Trump Jr. did not respond to this message. But just 15 minutes after it was sent, as The Wall Street Journal’s Byron Tau pointed out, Donald Trump himself tweeted, ‘Very little pick-up by the dishonest media of incredible information provided by WikiLeaks. So dishonest! Rigged system!’ Two days later, on October 14, 2016, Trump Jr. tweeted out the link WikiLeaks had provided him. ‘For those who have the time to read about all the corruption and hypocrisy all the @wikileaks emails are right here: http://wlsearch.tk/,’ he wrote.” http://theatln.tc/2yALp4l

— @DonaldJTrumpJr: “Here is the entire chain of messages with @wikileaks (with my whopping 3 responses) which one of the congressional committees has chosen to selectively leak. How ironic! 1/3” http://bit.ly/2ADgR2n … http://bit.ly/2ieQYPI … http://bit.ly/2zJubTK

— “Pence denies knowing about Trump Jr. WikiLeaks contacts,” by Matt Nussbaum: “‘The Vice President was never aware of anyone associated with the campaign being in contact with Wikileaks,’ said Pence’s press secretary, Alyssa Farah, in a statement. ‘He first learned of this news from a published report earlier tonight.’ Pence was asked in October 2016 if the Trump campaign was ‘in cahoots’ with WikiLeaks as it released droves of damaging information about Hillary Clinton. ‘Nothing could be further from the truth,’ Pence responded at the time.” http://politi.co/2id4FP0

THE JUICE …

— JAMES COMEY has signed with the Washington Speakers Bureau. From the release announcing his signing: “With candor and humility, Comey addresses the critical issues on everyone’s minds and explains why, in spite of everything he’s seen and experienced, he remains optimistic about the future of our country.”

— REBECCA BERG is now a CNN political reporter. Video of Wolf breaking the news on the “Situation Room” http://bit.ly/2zIEIOK

— JOE BIDEN on Colbert last night – clips http://bit.ly/2hBD6BT … http://bit.ly/2zX2ucR … The full interview http://bit.ly/2zX9tTj

–FIRST IN PLAYBOOK — The “Not One Penny” coalition is launching a national ad buy against the tax reform bill. The ad is airing on English and Spanish-language stations starting Tuesday and running through Nov. 21. The ad http://bit.ly/2jq2jzY

–FOR THE RECORD BOOKS — “President Trump has made 1,628 false or misleading claims over 298 days,” by WaPo’s Glenn Kessler, Meg Kelly and Nicole Lewis: http://wapo.st/2AFnPEe

PHOTO DU JOUR: Beverly Young Nelson, the latest accuser of Alabama Senate Republican nominee Roy Moore, shows her high school yearbook allegedly signed by Moore, at a news conference, in New York on Nov. 13. Nelson says Moore sexually assaulted her when she was 16. Moore denies the allegations. | Richard Drew/AP Photo

ISAAC DOVERE talks with FORMER DEFENSE SECRETARY BILL PERRY for the latest “Off Message” Podcast: “Stop counting on Mattis and Tillerson to stop nuclear war, former Defense Secretary Bill Perry tells Isaac, as Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) on Tuesday holds a hearing on Trump’s first strike authority. Mattis and Tillerson are a ‘stabilizing influence,’ Perry said, but with this president, ‘I’m not really comfortable with anybody.’ ‘In a five or six or seven-minute kind of decision, the secretary of defense probably never hears about it until it’s too late. If there is time, and if he does consult the secretary, it’s advisory, just that,’ Perry explained. ‘Whether [the president] goes with it or doesn’t go with it—[the secretary] doesn’t have the authority to stop it.’” http://politi.co/2yDfLTx

ON THE WORLD STAGE — “Protesters Jeer as Trump Team Promotes Coal at U.N. Climate Talks,” by NYT’s Lisa Friedman and Brad Plumer in Bonn: “The Trump administration made its debut at a United Nations conference on climate change on Monday by giving a full-throated defense of fossil fuels and nuclear energy as answers to driving down global greenhouse gas emissions. … [E]ven before the Trump team could make its case, the panel was disrupted for more than 10 minutes by scores of chanting and singing demonstrators. The protesters then walked out, leaving the room half empty. Throughout the remainder of the presentation, audience members shouted down and mocked White House officials who attempted to explain away President Trump’s stated view that global warming is a hoax.” http://nyti.ms/2yAEgko

FEDERAL LAW ENFORCEMENT’S “WOMAN” PROBLEM – POLITICO’s new “Women Rule” investigation package dives deep into the world of federal law enforcement, which has an enormous gender gap. The Border Patrol has the fewest women represented in its workforce, totaling just 5% of its agents — a lower percentage of women than the United States Marines (8%) and all active-duty military branches overall (16%). Though the Border Patrol has tried to recruit and retain women, such efforts have largely failed. Find out why in the latest investigative package. http://politi.co/2hqDXS9

FOR YOUR RADAR — “House declares U.S. military role in Yemen’s civil war unauthorized,” by Gregory Hellman: “In a rare exercise of its war-making role, the House of Representatives on Monday overwhelmingly passed a resolution explicitly stating that U.S. military assistance to Saudi Arabia in its war in Yemen is not authorized under legislation passed by Congress to fight terrorism or invade Iraq.

“The non-binding resolution adopted 366-30, does not call for a halt to the American support but publicly acknowledges the Pentagon has been sharing targeting information and refueling warplanes that Saudi Arabia and other allies are using to attack Houthi rebels in a conflict that is widely considered a proxy war with Iran — and a humanitarian disaster. It states, in part, that U.S. military operations are only authorized to fight Al Qaeda and other allied terrorist groups in Yemen, not Shiite Muslim rebels.” http://politi.co/2yZkzqE

****** A message from Chevron: This is a story about energy, safety, and some truly high-flyin’ doin’. We’re piloting a program that uses drones, HD imaging, and thermal mapping to help keep a close eye on Chevron wells, tanks, and pipelines—all to keep DOERS and what they’re doin’ safer. Watch the video: http://politi.co/2zOnTVE ******

OOPS — “Trump Judicial Pick Did Not Disclose He Is Married to a White House Lawyer,” by NYT’s Matt Apuzzo and Mike Schmidt: “One of President Trump’s most controversial judicial nominees did not disclose on publicly available congressional documents that he is married to a senior lawyer in the White House Counsel’s Office. The nominee, Brett J. Talley, is awaiting a Senate confirmation vote … to become a federal district judge in Alabama. He is married to Ann Donaldson, the chief of staff to the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II. Mr. Talley was asked on his publicly released Senate questionnaire to identify family members and others who are ‘likely to present potential conflicts of interest.’ He did not mention his wife.” http://nyti.ms/2yADHXO

— “A Trump Judicial Nominee Appears To Have Written About Politics On A Sports Website And Didn’t Disclose It,” by BuzzFeed’s Zoe Tillman: “One of President Donald Trump’s federal court nominees appears to have written posts for years on a University of Alabama sports fan website — including posts about gun control and immigration — and didn’t disclose the writings on his Senate questionnaire. … Many of BamainBoston’s posts are about sports. But some address politics and other nonsports subjects. On Dec. 17, 2012, a few days after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, BamainBoston posted, ‘My solution would be to stop being a society of pansies and man up.’ … According to TideFans.com, user BamainBoston joined the site in March 2005, and has published 16,381 posts.” http://bzfd.it/2mohLNT

ANDREA NEWMAN’S RETIREMENT PARTY — Pool report: “Over two dozen Members of Congress joined Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, OMB Director Mick Mulvaney, Delta Airlines CEO Ed Bastian and many others last night at a reception in honor of Andrea Newman, who retired this summer as Delta’s Senior Vice President of Government Affairs after a 22-year career in the airline industry.”

SPOTTED at “Meet the Press”’ inaugural film festival last night (which featured 16 short political docs) at the Landmark Atlantic Plumbing Cinema: Chuck Todd, Andrea Mitchell, Joy Reid, Pete Williams, Kristen Welker, Katy Tur, Kasie Hunt, Steve Kornacki — pic of Chuck and Andrea http://bit.ly/2zHbMGY … Ben Rhodes, Jen Palmieri and Reggie Love at Pete Souza’s talk and book signing for “Obama: An Intimate Portrait” last night at 6th and I.

ENGAGED – ELI STOKOLS, WSJ White House reporter and an MSNBC contributor, proposed to ELENA SCHNEIDER, campaign reporter for Politico. The couple met at Politico, where Eli previously worked. Eli emails us: “On Elena’s birthday, which was last Tuesday, I asked her to pack a weekend bag. Days later, on a 109-year-old boat, floating down a canal in Amsterdam, I fumbled around in my pocket and got down on one knee. When we got our bearings again, we verified: she’d said yes. A rainbow slid down out of the clouds behind some old, crooked Dutch houses. It was magic.” Instapics http://bit.ly/2zVOyzN … http://bit.ly/2yZvzo0

WEEKEND CIVIL CEREMONY — Patrick Wilson, former Pence legislative director and Cummins lobbyist, to Jason Geske, a professional staff member on the House Homeland Security Committee who previously worked for former Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) and the NSA, on Veterans Day at the Hay-Adams. “The couple met in the travel section of KramerBooks and Afterwords in Dupont Circle.” Pic http://bit.ly/2iS4cBq

SPOTTED: former Sen. Mark Kirk, Mike Platt and his wife Jennifer, Ian Steff, Paul Mandelson, John Avlon and Margaret Hoover, Toby Harnden, Jeni Healy, Matthew Bravo and wife Summer, Jeff Farrah, Brett Quick, Will and Noelle Hubbard, Jason Gorey and Lauren Ehrsam, Jonathan Murphy and his wife Emily, Timothy R. Obitts and his wife Krista, and Alexandra Wich.

BIRTHWEEK (was yesterday): Bradd Jaffy of NBC News (hat tip: Erika Masonhall)

BIRTHDAY OF THE DAY: Liz Jarvis-Shean, head of global public affairs at Airbnb, former director of global communications at Tesla and research director in the Obama White House and for Pres. Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign. How she’s celebrating: “My boyfriend and I celebrated over the weekend, having a lazy morning, then going for a hike in our favorite open space preserve in the Santa Cruz Mountains that earned us burgers and beers at the Alpine Inn in Portola Valley. As for tonight, we’re using my birthday as an excuse to try a new restaurant and continue our pursuit of the best soup dumplings in Bay Area.” Read her Playbook Plus Q&A: http://politi.co/2iePfcW

BIRTHDAYS: Condoleezza Rice is 63 … Valerie Jarrett … Prince Charles is 69 … P.J. O’Rourke is 7-0 … Peter Lattman … Jonathan Landman … Ben Rhodes … Francis J. Kelly, managing director and global coordinator of public affairs at Deutsche Bank … William Black … WaPo’s Paige Winfield Cunningham … John Lockett … GWU political scientist Sarah Binder … John Jameson … Sally Sterling of Spencer Stuart’s education, nonprofit and government practice (h/t Jon Haber) … Politico’s Lauren Lanza and John Lockett … former Rep. Steve Stockman (R-Tex.) is 61 … Joshua Friedlander of the Brunswick Group … Sarah Holbrooke … Bill Larson … Vanessa VandeHey, “a diehard Packers fan who keeps the Speaker’s Office running day in and day out” (h/ts Jordan Dunn and Jessica Cameron) … Kate Coyne McCoy … Ed Reno … Ashley Yehl …

… Rachel Noerdlinger, managing director at Mercury … D.C. native Tony Powell, “Washington photographer of the stars” (h/t Ben Chang) … Lana (Volftsun) Fern, founder of White Light Strategies … Madeleine Weast, press secretary for Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) (h/ts Melissa Brown and Sophie White) … Tommy Schultz, national comms director for the American Federation for Children and a Romney alum … Julia Renée Nonis … Jacob Freedman, senior director at Albright Stonebridge … Rob Gulans … Tricia Miller Klapheke … Airbnb’s Josh Meltzer … Michael Collier … Mark Gyorfy … Taylor Griffin, press secretary for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi … Daniel Alders

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New Neocon Mantra: Iran, like Soviet Union, on Verge of Collapse

The realize that #TraitorTrump, #LoserTrump is clueless and will be up for anything he hopes will make him look like a winner no matter what it costs others in life, family or homes.

By Jim Lobe WASHINGTON, Jul 7 2017 (IPS)

Iran hawks suddenly have a new mantra: the Islamic Republic is the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, and the Trump administration should work to hasten the regime’s impending collapse.

It’s not clear why this comparison has surfaced so abruptly. Its proponents don’t cite any tangible or concrete evidence that the regime in Tehran is somehow on its last legs. But I’m guessing that months of internal policy debate on Iran has finally reached the top echelons in the policy-making chaos that is the White House these days. And the hawks, encouraged by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s rather offhand statement late last month that Washington favors “peaceful” regime change in Iran, appear to be trying to influence the internal debate by arguing that this is Trump’s opportunity to be Ronald Reagan. Indeed, this comparison is so ahistorical, so ungrounded in anything observable, that it can only be aimed at one person, someone notorious for a lack of curiosity and historical perspective, and a strong attraction to “fake news” that magnifies his ego and sense of destiny.

This new theme seemed to have come out of the blue Tuesday with the publication on the Wall Street Journal’s comics—I mean, op-ed—pages of a column entitled “Confront Iran the Reagan Way” by the South Africa-born, Canada-raised CEO of the Likudist Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), Mark Dubowitz. I wish I could publish the whole thing (which is behind a paywall), but a couple of quotes will have to suffice:

In the early 1980s, President Reagan shifted away from his predecessors’ containment strategy toward a new plan of rolling back Soviet expansionism. The cornerstone of his strategy was the recognition that the Soviet Union was an aggressive and revolutionary yet internally fragile regime that had to be defeated.

Reagan’s policy was outlined in 1983 in National Security Decision Directive 75, a comprehensive strategy that called for the use of all instruments of American overt and covert power. The plan included a massive defense buildup, economic warfare, support for anti-Soviet proxy forces and dissidents, and an all-out offensive against the regime’s ideological legitimacy.

Mr. Trump should call for a new version of NSDD-75 and go on offense against the Iranian regime.

…the American pressure campaign should seek to undermine Iran’s rulers by strengthening the pro-democracy forces that erupted in Iran in 2009, nearly toppling the regime. Target the regime’s soft underbelly: its massive corruption and human-rights abuses. Conventional wisdom assumes that Iran has a stable government with a public united behind President Hassan Rouhani’s vision of incremental reform. In reality, the gap between the ruled and their Islamist rulers is expanding.

….The administration should present Iran the choice between a new [nuclear] agreement and an unrelenting American pressure campaign while signaling that it is unilaterally prepared to cancel the existing deal if Tehran doesn’t play ball.

Only six years after Ronald Reagan adopted his pressure strategy, the Soviet bloc collapsed. Washington must intensify the pressure on the mullahs as Reagan did on the communists. Otherwise, a lethal nuclear Iran is less than a decade away.

Dubowitz, who clearly has allies inside the administration, asserts that parts of this strategy are already being implemented. “CIA Director Mike Pompeo is putting the agency on an aggressive footing against [the Iranian regime’s terrorist] global networks with the development of a more muscular covert action program.” Dubowitz predictably urges “massive economic sanctions,” calls for “working closely with allied Sunni governments,” and argues—rather dubiously—that “Europeans …may support a tougher Iran policy if it means Washington finally gets serious about Syria.” As for the alleged domestic weaknesses of the regime, let alone its similarity to the USSR in its decline, he offers no evidence whatever.

Takeyh Joins In

I thought this was a crazy kind of one-off by FDD, which, of course, houses former American Enterprise Institute (AEI) Freedom Scholar Michael Ledeen, who has been predicting the imminent demise of the Islamic Republic—and Supreme Leader Khamenei—for some 20 years or so. Ledeen also co-authored former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s bizarre 2016 autobiography and no doubt tutored the NSC’s 31-year-old intelligence director, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, whose conviction that the regime can be overthrown has been widely reported.

But then a friend brought to my attention a short piece posted Wednesday on The Washington Post’s website by Ray Takeyh, a Council on Foreign Relations Iran specialist who in recent years has cavorted with Dubowitz and FDD and similarly inclined Likudist groups, notably the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). Entitled “It’s Time to Prepare for Iran’s Political Collapse,” it also compared Iran today with the Soviet Union on the verge.

Today, the Islamic republic lumbers on as the Soviet Union did during its last years. It professes an ideology that convinces no one. It commands security services that proved unreliable in the 2009 rebellion, causing the regime to deploy the Basij militias because many commanders of the Revolutionary Guards refused to shoot the protesters.

…Today, the Islamic republic will not be able to manage a succession to the post of the supreme leader as its factions are too divided and its public too disaffected.…

The task of a judicious U.S. government today is to plan for the probable outbreak of another protest movement or the sudden passing of Khamenei that could destabilize the system to the point of collapse. How can we further sow discord in Iran’s vicious factional politics? How can the United States weaken the regime’s already unsteady security services? This will require not just draining the Islamic republic’s coffers but also finding ways to empower its domestic critics. The planning for all this must start today; once the crisis breaks out, it will be too late for America to be a player.

Once again, actual evidence for the regime’s fragility is not offered. Indeed, although he claims that the 2009 “Green Revolt” “forever delegitimized the system and severed the bonds between state and society,” he fails to note that May’s presidential election resulted in a landslide win for President Hassan Rouhani with 73 percent voter turnout, or that reformist candidates swept the local council polls in most major cities, or that the leader of the reformist movement, leaders of the Green Movement, and prominent political prisoners encouraged participation. Nor does he address the question of whether Washington’s intervention in Iran’s internal politics—in whatever form—will actually help or harm efforts by the regime’s “domestic critics” to promote reform, particularly in light of the recent disclosures of the extent and persistence of U.S. intervention in the events leading up to and including the 1953 coup that ousted the democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadeq. Or whether last month’s terrorist attack by ISIS in Tehran might have strengthened the relationship between society and state.

This is not to deny that the regime is both oppressive and highly factionalized, but why is it suddenly so vulnerable—so much like the Soviet Union of the late 1980s—compared to what it was five or ten or 20 or 25 years ago? Only because Khamenei is likely to pass from the scene sooner rather than later? That seems like a weak reed on which to base a policy as fraught as what is being proposed.

Again, I’m not sure that this Iran=USSR-at-death’s-door meme is aimed so much at the public, or even the foreign-policy elite, as it is toward the fever swamps of a White House run by the likes of Steve Bannon or Stephen Miller or Cohen-Watnick. But here’s why a little more research into the new equation really got my attention.

And Also Lieberman

Dubowitz’s article, it turns out, was not the first recent reference. The most direct recent reference was offered by none other than former Sen. Joseph Lieberman, who incidentally is one of three members of FDD’s “Leadership Council,” in a speech before none other than the annual conference of the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) and its cult leader, Maryam Rajavi, outside Paris July 1. Seemingly anticipating Takeyh (plus the Rajavi reference), Lieberman declared:

Some things have changed inside Iran, and that’s at the level of the people. You can never suppress a people, you can never enslave a people forever. The people of Iran inside Iran have shown the courage to rise up… To just talk about that, to just talk about that, to hold Madam Rajavi’s picture up in public places, is a sign of the unrest of the people and the growing confidence of the people that change is near. The same is true of the remarkable public disagreements between the various leaders of the country…It is time for America and hopefully some of our allies in Europe to give whatever support we can to those who are fighting for freedom within Iran.

He then went on, “Long before the Berlin Wall collapsed, long before the Soviet Union fell, the United States was supporting resistance movements within the former Soviet Union”—an apparent reference, albeit not an entirely clear one — to the Reagan Doctrine and its purported role in provoking the Communist collapse.

And, in a passage that no doubt expressed what at least Dubowitz and his allies think but can’t say publicly at this point:

The Arab nations are energized under the leadership of King Salman and Crown Prince [Mohammed] bin Salman. [Saudi Prince (and former intelligence chief) Turki Al Faisal Al Saudi addressed the “Free Iran Gathering” just before Lieberman.] They’re more active diplomatically and militarily as part of a resistance against the regime in Iran than we’ve ever seen before. And of course for a long time the state of Israel, because its very existence is threatened by the regime in Iran, has wanted to help change that regime. So you have coming together now a mighty coalition of forces: America, the Arab world, and Israel joining with the Resistance, and that should give us hope that we can make that [regime] change.

Putting aside the question of just how popular or unpopular Madam Rajavi is in Iran for a second, there are a number of truly remarkable things about Lieberman’s speech. How much will it help “the resistance” in Iran to be seen as supported by the Saudis and the “Arab nations?” And how will it help to boast about Israel’s assistance when most Iranians already appear to believe that the Islamic State is a creation of the Saudis and/or Israel? Is there any “mighty coalition” more likely to permanently alienate the vast majority of Iranians? Is it possible that the MEK has become an IRGC counter-intelligence operation? It’s very clear indeed that the group is lobbying heavily—and spending lavishly—to become the administration’s chosen instrument for achieving regime change. But advertising Saudi and Israeli support for the enterprise will likely make that goal more elusive. The MEK’s reputation in Iran was bad enough, but this is really over the top.

Lieberman no doubt received ample compensation for saying what he said. Other former prominent US officials, including John Bolton, Rudy Giuliani, and Gen. Jack Keane—all of whom probably have closer ties than Lieberman to the White House – also spoke at the MEK event, which, incidentally, makes me think that the White House is indeed seriously considering supporting the group as at least one part of its Iran policy. I suspect we’ll find out soon enough.

This piece was originally published in Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy Lobelog.com

The post New Neocon Mantra: Iran, like Soviet Union, on Verge of Collapse appeared first on Inter Press Service.

By Vijay Prashad. This article was first published on Frontline.

NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP President Donald Trump speaks at a rally at Orlando Melbourne International Airport, in Melbourne, Florida on February 18. The next day, Swedes reacted with confusion, anger and ridicule on to a vague remark by Trump at the rally that suggested that something terrible had occurred in their country.

IT is hard to predict what will happen in the Trump White House. A senior diplomat tells me that he would prefer to watch old episodes of House of Cards rather than watch news programmes. A veteran of the Barack Obama administration predicts that President Donald Trump will not last even a few months. The rigours of the actual presidency will wear him out. Trump likes the theatre, but he will not have the stomach for the grind. Speaking to a woman in the State Department is amusing. She says that the analysts suffer from whiplash. The political direction comes from Twitter in the rush of messages dispatched from the President early in the morning but then is modulated and shaped by his advisers later in the day. “We don’t know what is going on,” she said. These are all seasoned Washington, D.C., insiders. None of them sees anything normal about the Trump White House.

It would be easier to report on the Trump presidency if it were plagued by scandals. That is familiar territory. What you have instead is a power battle inside the Trump administration that does not seem capable of being controlled. This is more Game of Thrones than House of Cards. Chief of Staff Reince Priebus is at loggerheads with Chief Strategist Steve Bannon. White House counsellor Kellyanne Conway says things that are at odds with what is reported by White House press secretary Sean Spicer. Rumours flood Washington that various factions inside the Trump administration are leaking stories in order to damage their competitors. Trump, says one insider, is content being the emperor above them, a Mortal God who allows his underlings to wage a war of all against all. Trump, in his bathrobe, eating his Big Mac on a silver plate, watching television in the dark—he is a cross between the overestimated Wizard of Oz and the omnipotent Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes.

Meanwhile, Trump’s nominees for his Cabinet to run the major Ministries of the federal government idle their time. He has sent so many billionaires with such thin resumes and such thick ideological dispositions that the Senate, which has the right to oversee these appointments, simply cannot digest the information fast enough. The people who have taken their seats are stunningly incompetent or adversarial to their own posts. Betsy DeVos, the Education Secretary, is a billionaire who has financed campaigns against public education. Tom Price, the Health and Human Services Secretary, was a former Congressman who fought Obama’s health care plan as if it were the greatest threat to the United States. These are people with little broad credibility.

No wonder that James Mattis, the Defence Secretary, and Rex Tillerson, the Secretary of State, seem stable. Mattis believes against all evidence that Iran and the Islamic State—fundamental adversaries—are somehow allied. Tillerson, as head of Exxon, has shown little capacity for statesmanship outside corporate interest. Nonetheless, in comparison to the others, these men seem the epitome of distinction. As the ship of state splutters, these men struggle to control the tiller.

To Russia with love It sometimes seems as if Russia, not the U.S., won the Cold War. Democratic Party politicians continue to suggest that Russia was able to sufficiently influence the election to prevent Hillary Clinton from winning. Suggestions of contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence bedevil the political discourse. The “deep state” in the U.S.—namely the intelligence agencies—has perhaps leaked sufficient information to damage quite seriously any possibility for Trump to ease the tension between the U.S. and Russia. The resignation of Trump’s National Security Adviser, Michael Flynn, was the first casualty of these leaks. Others will follow. The “deep state”, abused in public by Trump, will not be taken lightly. He made a grave error in crossing the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and its more mysterious cousins. They will make Trump pay.

Meanwhile, the National Security Council is in serious disarray. Trump’s closest ideological ally, Steve Bannon, has brought politics into the heart of what is often considered as a sanctum for intelligence and military analysts. They do not want domestic politics to intervene in their decision-making. This is their conceit. Bannon’s presence brings American political considerations into discussions of national security. Sitting near Bannon is an art historian with no experience in the world of intelligence or security. Professor Victoria Coates writes a blog at the RedState website and helped former Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on his book. Perhaps she is there because she will help Trump digest the conversations. He likes one-page presentations “with lots of graphics and maps”, according to The New York Times. One official in the White House told the newspaper: “The President likes maps.” He is a deeply visual person. Reading irritates him. His ex-wife Ivana Trump once said that beside his bed, Trump kept a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. One should rest assured that he most likely never read it.

It was perhaps reasonable for Trump to consider what the Americans call a “reset” on its policy with Russia. Tensions between the U.S. and Russia have damaged U.S. power both in Europe and in West Asia. Threats over the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s (NATO) expansion eastward have pushed countries inside Europe to either become more belligerent against Russia—and thereby damage relations with a major supplier of natural gas—or to move closer to Russia—and thereby threaten the unity of Europe. In the 1980s, the Soviet Union lost much of its toehold in North Africa and West Asia, particularly when the Egyptian government pivoted from the Soviet Union to the U.S. around 1979-80. Now, with U.S. policy in the region in disarray, the Russians have strengthened their position in Syria, Iran, Egypt and Libya. Trump’s theory of a reset was logical from the standpoint of U.S. power. It would have served to rein in Russian ambitions. But that is now in the past. It would be too suspicious for Trump to make a deal with the Russians. The “deep state” will insist that the bellicosity be maintained. Trump will preside over the further decline of American power.

Bibi and Donald Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife, Sarah, are in deep trouble inside Israel. They face charges of corruption and might very well see the inside of a prison cell before Netanyahu, also known as Bibi, leaves office. This was the context of their visit to the U.S., where Trump gave them a royal welcome. They were photographed inside the Oval Office, sitting on the cream coloured chairs with Trump and his wife, Melania. It was as if the Trumps and the Netanyahus had not a care in the world.

At their joint press conference, Netanyahu seemed deeply enamoured of Trump. Bibi spoke in his customary baritone voice, but he laughed in a totally uncharacteristic way—almost flirtatiously. Trump fumbled his way through a discussion about Israel’s occupation of Palestine. He offered, with no real assessment, that the two-state solution was no longer U.S. policy. Netanyahu seemed to revel in this new period, with the idea that the Palestinian state was no longer on the table an appealing one for him. But this idea of the one-state solution should trouble all parties. What would it mean? No journalist was permitted to ask a question about this new reality. Would Israel annex the West Bank and East Jerusalem, both areas now treated as occupied territories under international law? If Israel does annex these areas, would the Palestinians who live there be granted full citizenship of Israel? If this happens, it is likely that the Palestinians in Israel would be in the demographic majority. The idea of the “Jewish State” would be annulled by the new facts on the ground. If Israel does not give the Palestinians full citizenship, then will the Palestinians of the annexed regions have to live in a permanent apartheid situation? Would the international community tolerate such apartheid rules? None of this was raised in the press conference, nor did the leaders explain it.

Trump was happy to be there with a man who fawned upon him. It made the press conference palatable. Facts are intolerable to Trump. He likes spin and perception. Adulation is what he requires. In a testy exchange with CNN’s Jim Acosta, Trump said: “I would be your biggest fan in the world if you treated me right.”

from Home http://ift.tt/2lDwaky

By Vijay Prashad. This article was first published on Frontline.

Donald Trump feels he has to undo a great deal from the eight years of Barack Obama’s presidency, and he is in a hurry. Obamacare has been ordered out and a “Muslim Ban” is signed in. His deregulation orders are just what the corporate sector wants. All this to “Make America Great Again”!

Time is of no consequence in America these days. President Donald Trump awakens early and fires off a tweet. These are as important as the executive orders he has been signing with remarkable frequency. He is a man in a hurry. There is a great deal, he feels, to undo from the eight years of Barack Obama’s presidency. It is almost as if Trump does not believe that he will be long in the job. Changes must be made, and speed is of the essence. The midnight oil burns in the White House feverishly.

The executive orders are hard to keep up with. Serious issues are deliberated in a few pages. Trump ordered federal agencies to set aside Obama’s health care initiative, which was one of the main social reforms passed in recent memory. Trump’s anger at what is known as Obamacare is part of the general corporate sensibility against regulations of any kind. Trump pushed for oil companies to be able to build their controversial pipelines and demanded that federal agencies must ease up on financial and environmental regulations. One order said that if the government introduces a new regulation, it must first abolish two others. This is sweet music to the corporate sector, which instinctively dislikes the fetters of government intervention. The Trump claim is that deregulation will spur business activity, produce growth and therefore deliver jobs to the “forgotten Americans” —Trump’s base.

The deregulation orders did not receive the kind of attention they deserve. These are dull compared with the more flashy orders, the ones that reflected Trump’s most dramatic campaign promises: build the wall against Mexico, ban Muslims, and fight “radical Islamic terrorism”. It was the flash of the orders on these issues that drew all the attention. No one expected Trump to actually enact these policies. It was felt by the encrusted establishment that Trump—like other politicians—would make grand social claims during the campaign but would then ignore these promises when the “realities” of governance settled in. But Trump and his team had no patience for such formulas. Trump and his advisers know full well that his base—the “forgotten Americans”—is hungry for action. They want their man to deliver something fast. Trump will not be able to take the American economy by the throat and make it cough out jobs. That is simply impossible. Far easier to tackle these social issues to prove his fidelity to his base.

When the orders came out, a frisson of delight went through Trump’s base. Early polls showed that the majority of Americans disapproved of Trump’s “Muslim Ban”, but 45 per cent of those asked said that they approved of it. That is about the same percentage of the electorate that voted for Trump. A seam of the Far Right —including the fascists—have long said that the decline in the fortunes of the white Americans came from the enfranchisement of blacks, Latinos, immigrants, gays, lesbians and Muslims. “Make America Great Again” is a line that Ronald Reagan used as his campaign slogan in 1980. During a speech in that campaign, Reagan said that his project was for a “national crusade to make America great again”. The word “crusade” with all its Christian implications is an old one for the American Right, but here it was linked to the suggestion that America—in 1980—had been lessened by the gains of the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, which had been driven by secularism. These had to be put in their place. Reagan, and now Trump, would cleanse the country of its crud and reveal it for what it was always supposed to be: a white, Christian nation. It is fitting that the Trump administration will remove the white supremacist groups and the fascist groups from the terror listing; only “radical Islamic terrorists” will be on that list.

Orders can be delivered with ease, but implementation is another story. The “Muslim Ban”, for instance, created chaos between the Customs and Border Protection and the Department of Homeland Security. Officials in these government agencies, as well as in the State Department, did not know how to act on the basis of the orders. A hundred thousand visas were cancelled in the chaos. One minute no one from the seven countries was allowed to board a flight to the U.S., and the next minute people were allowed on aircraft. It is this chaos that has come to define the Trump administration. Deliberative statements from above do not translate easily for the massive apparatus of the U.S. government.

These orders came from Trump’s pen with a great flourish of royalty. Trump did not deign to explain his decisions or make any argument. There is no time for that. His language is simple and direct. “We’re going to do great,” he says, “we’ll make America great.” Complexity is not necessary. There is no conversation here about how computers and other technology have made workers more productive, which has led to a great haemorrhaging of jobs. It is this, rather than foreign trade, that has truly cut deep into the heart of employment in factories and in fields. None of this is on the table. Trump is able to blame a long list of people who have gained socially for the ailments of those who have been defeated economically. Hate crimes against the long list of Trump’s enemies —Mexicans, Muslims and those who look like them —have risen. Hatred has taken on a mundane quality. “Muslim-free zones” is a sign that can be found in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where there are only a handful of Muslims in residence. In Little Falls, Minnesota, two white men came to the home of a Somali family and told them to move out or else they would burn down the home. The Roth Family Jewish Community Centre of Greater Orlando (Florida), which runs a preschool, received three bomb threats in two weeks. In San Francisco (California), a white man accosted an Asian woman and said to her: “I hate your fucking race. We’re in charge of this country now.”

Will removing Bannon help?

Hatred of Obama defined Trump’s political life over the past eight years. He was one of the first to stoke the rumour that Obama was not an American and that he was a Kenyan immigrant. The “Birther Movement” embraced Trump, who thumped on this theme right until he became a presidential candidate. The sewers of the American Far Right—the fascists and racists—welcomed the attention given them by Trump’s celebrity. Here was a rich real estate baron and television star who was giving credence to the worst kind of falsehoods. It was in this drain that Trump met Breitbart News’ Steve Bannon.

Bannon drifted from Wall Street into the propaganda world of the Far Right, where he made films and curated a website that produced what is now known as “alt-facts” (alternative facts or, in more common language, lies). Over the years, Bannon has made clear his great dislike of the gains made by minority communities and of H-1B visa technocrats who surrounded him in the world of finance and media. His hatred of them was clarified in a March 2016 radio show, when he said: “Engineering schools are all full of people from South Asia, and East Asia. They’ve come in here to take these jobs.” American students, he said bitterly, “can’t get into these graduate schools”. Twenty per cent of the U.S. population is made up of immigrants, Bannon noted. “Is that not the beating heart of the problem?” These technocrats not only surrounded him, but they made him feel uneasy. “These are not Jeffersonian democrats,” he complained. “These are not people with thousands of years of democracy in their DNA coming in here.” Resentment and revenge are the contours of Bannon’s viewpoint. It is fitting that he used the term DNA in his statement. Skin is the limit of ideas such as democracy. America made an error, Bannon suggests, in allowing darker skins to participate in its democratic experiment. Trump brought him in as his main adviser for his campaign. Bannon is now, it is said, one of the main intellectuals of the Trump presidency.

Is Bannon Trump’s brain? Bewilderment at the depth of the Trump presidency has led some to think that the removal of Bannon would somehow bring normalcy to Trump’s world. But this might be wishful thinking. Each of Trump’s Cabinet appointments and many of his political appointments into the agencies seem Bannonesque in their world view. They are behind the “Muslim Ban” and the “Mexican Wall”; they would like to undermine public education and eviscerate regulations; they would like to lift up “alt-facts” to the status of reality and send pesky reporters to prison. This is a world view shared across the administration, from Vice President Mike Pence to Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly. Talking to people in the Trump administration is startling: they believe that they have been out of power and are now, finally, in charge, with little time to spare. Bannon is not their leader. What unites them is the feeling of resentment and revenge that he articulates and Trump embodies.

Resistance

Trump’s ban on the entry of people from seven Muslim-majority countries was not going to be taken quietly. Organisations that work on civil liberties and refugee relief as well as Left groups and platforms such as Black Lives Matter and Occupy hastily mobilised people to flood the airports. From John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York to San Francisco International Airport, the crowds chanted “Let Them In” and “Not My President”. It was a powerful demonstration, with bodies on the line to resist the Trump order and to make it clear that such actions would not go unchallenged on the streets.

Democratic Party politicians hastened to the airports to give their support to the protests. Senator Elizabeth Warren went to Boston airport and said: “We will make our voices heard all around the world. We will not turn away children, we will not turn away families, we will not turn away anyone because of their religion.” Senator Kamala Harris, the first Indian American Senator in U.S. history, was forthright in her criticism. “On Holocaust Memorial Day, President Trump enacted an executive order that will restrict refugees from Muslim-majority countries. Make no mistake—this is a Muslim ban. During the Holocaust, we failed to let refugees like Anne Frank into our country. We can’t let history repeat itself.”

Trump’s threat to deport undocumented migrants received a sharp rebuke from Democratic politicians. Boston’s Mayor Marty Walsh said that any migrant who felt threatened could come to City Hall and take shelter. “If people want to live here,” he said, “they’ll live here. They can use my office. They can use any office in this building.” When a reporter asked him if this applied to “illegal immigrants”, Walsh was sharp with his rebuke saying that no one was illegal. Trump has threatened to withdraw federal money from cities and towns that do not enforce his anti-immigration agenda. “We will not be intimidated by a threat of federal funding,” said Walsh. “We will not retreat one inch.”

Popular resistance strengthened the spine of these leaders, many of whom come from political traditions not used to such forthright resistance. This is not the time for politeness, they suggest. Stiffer measures are needed.

Boycotts of businesses that operate alongside the Trump agenda have had an impact. During the airport protests, the New York Taxi Workers’ Union decided to go on strike at the airport. Seeing an opportunity, Uber suspended its surge fees and decided to break the strike. Thousands of people deleted their Uber app, sending a strong message to the company. Its CEO felt the pressure to resign from Trump’s business council. Department stores such as Nordstrom’s and Neiman Marcus have dropped the Ivanka Trump jewellery line. Amazon and Expedia took the Trump administration to court saying that the immigration orders would hurt their business.

When the acting Attorney General, Sally Yates, refused to execute the “Muslim Ban”, Trump fired her. The view from the White House is that officials of the federal government must be loyal to Trump and not worry about the U.S. Constitution. Trump’s allies came in to defend his action, blaming the bureaucracy for their allegiance to liberal and secular values. “This is essentially the opposition in waiting,” said Trump’s friend Newt Gingrich. “He may have to clean out the Justice Department because there are so many left-wingers there. [The] State [Department] is even worse.” A chill has gone through the administration. Judge James Robarts, nominated to the federal courts by Trump’s fellow Republican George W. Bush, stayed the “Muslim Ban”. Trump called him a “so-called judge”, like the “so-called protesters”. These are not real people to Trump. They are to be swatted aside. Whether by an executive order or on Twitter.

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